Photo courtesy of tiffanywashko at Flickr.
So tomorrow is the big day. L’il I will no longer be exclusively breastfed. She’ll start with some brown organic rice infant cereal (seriously, it’s just, like, the thing to do) and before long be hoovering up all manner of food matter.
This is really one of the first big steps in a baby’s life. Especially if you wait a whole six months, like I have, before introducing solids. Because by six months, you’d better believe this baby is gonna be ready. In fact, if truth be told, her first food was almost a Giant Goldfish cracker. I took one out of ziplock bag yesterday to give to Young C. He ran out of the room, though, and L’il I just held out her hand like we’d done this a million times before and I gave it to her. I came to my senses just as she was putting it in her mouth. So while her first taste of non-breastmilk food was the salty processed cheese powder of a Goldfish, at least she didn’t actually swallow anything.
So she’ll eat about a tablespoon of runny, breast-milk-soaked baby cereal tomorrow morning and I’m confident that will go alright. We’ll keep that up for a few days to a week and then bump the cereal feed to lunch time and try some pureed fruit at breakfast. After a few days more days we’ll try a new fruit at breakfast and add dinner to the rotation. (I actually had to look that upbecause I could not remember for the life of me how Young C got from breast milk to calamari.) But I do remember that this so-called gradual process of introducing foods was actually really fast the first time, so I assume it will be truly breakneck this time around. I guess after feeding your baby the same fluid several times a day for six months, waiting a few days before introducing another food doesn’t seem so long.
I also seem to remember reading up a lot about baby-led weaning on the internet when Young C was this age. That’s this idea that babies don’t really need all this pureed mush, and that if you give them big (too big for choking on) hunks of food to gnaw on and soft stuff to gum they’ll do just fine and become better eaters sooner. Hmmm. I didn’t really swallow the theory whole (I know, groan … could not resist the pun for the life of me), but it did get me to let my guard down and not view every grown-up food as a potential danger. He was eating hunks of bread and banana and avacodo, then, if not at six months, certainly by eight months.
By six months, too, you really don’t need to worry about such a fine puree on the mush either. As long as they are eating the purees just fine, it’s okay to gradually add some texture. This gives them a head start toward real food and makes making your own baby food so much easier. I would mostly just throw some steamed veggies from dinner in a food mill and voila. (Or nuke some in a bit of water at lunch.) You can also throw meat in the food mill if you add a little water or homemade salt-free stock. I’m not such a purist that I was preparing big batches of baby food in the food processor and freezing them in ice cube trays like everyone else recommends. I dunno, maybe I’m just not that organized, but I always do better preparing meals on the fly. And the sooner L’il I is partaking of what’s on the menu for the rest of us, the better.
Oh, and I use the little jars. Of course my babies eat commercially prepared baby food. I haven’t been able to find any data that suggests that it’s any more nutritious to make your own. (Especially if you buy the organic stuff which also tastes way better and is worth the premium.) I really have no idea why some mothers are hell bent on feeding their tots exclusively homemade baby food. I mean, I guess if you like making it . . . But seeing as I’m always short on time, those little jars, coupled with mashing up whatever I’m already cooking, is just fine by me.
Of course, solid food means solid poo, too. That’s what I’m probably saddest about. The days of mild-smelling, soft yellow stool are over. Usher in months and months, years really, of brown, stinky crap in a variety of textures. And I’ve only just started to enjoy a couple of relatively shit-free months with Young C being toilet trained. At least I had those, I guess.
2 replies on “From Breast to the Rest: Starting Solids”
Best of luck with I’s transition toward solid food!
We jumped the gun a bit, and started adulterating K’s breast milk with rice cereal sometime after five months, just because she was so evidently ravenous all the time — it was the only thing that induced her to sleep more than two hours at a time. After that, though, our more concerted efforts to get her to eat swill (from a silver spoon, of course) went very slowly. At almost nine months, she’s a reluctant eater, which is a challenge given that it’s impossible to produce enough breast milk to meet her needs and I’ve been using up the frozen stash rather quickly.
I suspect it’s not that she doesn’t want to eat, but that she doesn’t care for jarred foods from the store (having tried them too, neither do we). As a result, increasingly we’ve just been giving her mushed up versions of what we’re having, plus whole yogurt and commercially prepared fruit mush, and she’s been taking to it rather well.
Her favourite foods, however, remain the breast sticks at grano and books. She has a special fondness for newsprint and Susan Swan’s novels.
At nine months it’ll still be breast milk she needs most. Have you started her on finger foods? Cheerios, melba toast? Sometimes you just have to let them eat what they’ll eat, though. But keep introducing those different tastes so she’ll like them eventually. Every kid’s different, I know. We’ll see how it goes with L’il I.