Category: Parent Talk
Okay Moms and Dads, a few questions for you:
When did you start your baby on solids?
How did you go about it: Spoon-feeding, bottle with bigger hole in nipple, or infant feeders? What did you start your baby on? How much did you give them? How did you avoid a mess? Or, how do you avoid messes now that you've got the hang of it? Did you have any trouble at first? Constipation, diarrhea, tummyache, refusing to eat from the spoon? What order did you introduce each food item? What age did you allow your child to feed themselves?
For my son, we've started rice cereal at four months. He's now eating it by spoon in a bowl mixed with apple juice. He started with it mixed in to his formula. We started out with about a teaspoon, and kept adding more as time went by. Now he eats four teaspoons in a bowl of apple juice. It's the consistency of thin oatmeal. We may start carrots this week, or we may move to oatmeal, not sure yet. He's five months old now, and so far he's doing okay. We had a little trouble with constipation, but it's getting better as his body gets used to it.
Hi, my son is 2 and a half now and pretty much eats everything not nailed down including vegetables. We started fruits first, introduceing each about 3 days between. Veggies came next and at about 10 months he was on to the graduates and feeding himself via hands. The first foods were hardest to feed. I'd hold the spoon in one hand and find his mouth with the other. Pretty much impossible to get messy but I just had a towel close by. Sippee cups are a must and now we're trying to minimize the spills with regular cups. Best advice for teaching feeding is do what you want them to do, they will copy from how to hold the utensiles to wipeing their faces with the napkin. Good luck. ya can contact if you want to talk more.
My baby girl is six months old, and she started rice cereal a few weeks ago. I also just started giving her apple juice in a sippy cup, and she did pretty well with it with me holding the cup. She is also starting to hold her own bottle a little now when I give her her formula. I usually do what the previous poster does, use the spoon in one hand and find her mouth with the other. I also use bibs when she eats her cereal, because sometimes she moves around a lot in her high chair. She usually does well with new things as far as eating though.
Misty
http://www.workathomeunited.com/mistybradley
Well, the La Leche League advises that you start solids around six months of age, but that your baby is the best indicator of when it is a good time to start, not your pediatrician, not your family and not your wants and desires, just read your baby. The LLL reccomends using the tung thrust reflex as a good way to read your infant. Try some pureed fruit or vegetable on a soft bite baby spoon and if they push it instantly from their mouth with their tung then weight and try again a week later Try every week until the reflex has disappeared. Infants can be perfectly healthy and happy, medically and nutritionally on nothing but breastmilk until they are at least a year old, although introducing solids as early as six months can be just fine if the baby indicates that they are ready. I am going to hold off on solids until my son is five and a half months old and then start trying to introduce them. I will start out with a single pureed vegetable or fruit at a time as this is the best way to figure out if there are any food alergies. If you start out with mixed foods you won't always be able to tell which food your baby is allergic to or dislikes if they have a negative reaction. Once you've created a negative association between two different foods it can be hard to break it. For example, if the first exposure your child has to strawberries is in applesauce, blended with blue berries, when they all ready like and have proven not to be alergic to apple sauce, and they are elergic to or absolutely hate the taste of the blue berries they might never like strawberries, because they associate the nasty blue berry taste or the sensations of vomiting or having their throat or face swell up with the strawberries, even though blue berries are the culprat. I think that a bottle can be helpful for introducing water, diluted fruit juice or diluted vegetable juice, but I prefer to introduce cereal with a spoon as the added force that a baby needs to exert on a bottle, even one with a nipple with a larger hole, in order to get cereal out of it can translate into a painful and unproductive roughness at the breast. I think that things like dry cereal and small bites of soft food that a child can pick up with their fingers is a great intermediate step between spoon feeding a baby and teaching the baby to spoonfeed him or her self. I hope some of this helps.
Well, I posted this topic awhile back, and have gotten my son through the initial solid-feeding frenzy, I mean phase. Lol. So, for anyone else whose interested in how to start feeding their baby solids, here I go.
I could only breastfeed for a month. I had a lot of medical complications and wasn't producing enough milk. So, at a month old, we put my son on Infamil formula, which is what WIC gives you. He was on four ounce bottles till he was about four months, then he was still hungry, so we gave him six-ounce bottles. At around five months, he was still very hungry after a six ounce so we moved him to eight, which proved to be not enough. So, I went ahead and started putting a teaspoon of rice cereal in his bottle. He was still not satisfied, so we graduated him to two teaspoons. Then we decided to try giving him a bowl of cereal mixed with formula. We mixed the same amount of formula together that would normally go in a six-ounce bottle (six ounces of water and 3 scoops of formula) plus enough cereal to turn it in to a thin soupy applesauce consistency. He would eat this before bed and have bottles during the day. We started him out with carots for a week, then applesauce, ten peas, then bananas. We tried each food separately for a few days, then added something new. He went through the first stage baby food with no fuss or allergy So we began the second stage food wich mixes the already tried veggies and fruits in to little groups say, apples and bananas, or we might get a container that had carrots, peas and greenbeans. After he graduated from stage two, he started eating soft bread, noodles, small chunks of fruit cocktail, and soft foods that would easily melt in his mouth and go down easily. We slowly have introduced meats in to his diet, and now he eats pretty much what we eat, just in smaller pieces He doesn't eat pork, it made him sick when we gave him a small piece, but chicken, turkey and beef are fine, just in pea-sized chunks. There are a few things he can't have until he's a year, (whole milk, honey, tuna, and eggs . He does very well, and we have yet to find something he won't eat.