My daughter has been getting in a rut lately eating all the same foods. Most of that is on me – somewhere between needing to find or think of new meals, get ingredients for them during my next grocery store trip, and making them for her, something gets lost.

Part of this trend is that once these habits have been established, she finds it unappealing to try new foods.

I’d been meaning to make a food passport for her for a while now. I made all the pages in OmniGraffle, and found pictures from Google Images. She brings it with us to the store, which allows us to pick a few new things try together – my hope is that by giving her a role in this she both gets some agency and some accountability when the time comes to actually try these foods. It also helps me to not have to be creative in thinking of new foods while actually at the store.

Not all of the foods in here are new and novel. About half are already some of her favorites, which I figured would help her form an association between foods being in this book and foods being good as well as give her an easy out for some of our shopping. This way the things that she picks out don’t all have to be new and daunting.

I chose to make it look as much like a real passport as possible, as we had been going through the process of getting our real passports and so I thought she’d have some context for it.

I wanted the foods to be alphabetized, so it took some care in figuring out which foods went in on what printed pages since they were printed double-sided and then bound as a single signature. Once printed, I cut the pages out, folded them, added a cover, and sewed them up.

For the cover, I wanted something seemingly ornate, but I didn’t want to spend a lot of time on it. I had some gold acrylic paint and a stamp that I found in our miscellaneous craft supplies, which worked pretty well. I put too much paint on the stamp, so it slipped around a little while actually stamping and the excess accumulated at the edges.

When she tries any of these foods, she gets a stamp.