Saturday, July 10, 2010

solid foods project

solid foods project

jude is almost 5 months old and we just started solids last week.  many of my friends also had babies around the same time as we did and I would love for us to share the things that we do to learn from each other.  I would love ideas and suggestions from those who have done this before and hope it can benefit lots of us!

I want to make Jude's food myself.  Since I have no real idea how to do this, I picked up a copy of Super Baby Food at Borders. I would highly recommend this book.
We started off with Earth's Best Rice Cereal because it is organic and is whole-grain brown rice.  The first day I mixed 1 tsp. of cereal with about 2 Tbsp. of breastmilk so it was very liquidy.  The next day I doubled the amount.  A couple of days later we moved to 1 Tbsp. of dry cereal mixed with breastmilk, now we are at 2 Tbsp of dry cereal, but I add don't add much more breastmilk since he is doing well with a thicker consistency.  I am thinking about moving him to oatmeal cereal tomorrow because the rice cereal can be binding and he hasn't had a poopie diaper in 3 days.

Super Baby Food suggests beginning with avocado, banana, or sweet potatoes.  So I made my first baby food cubes by mashing ripe avocado and banana and freezing them in ice cube trays.
To start, I thawed one cube of avocado in the microwave for 20 seconds and then added some breastmilk to it to make it thinner.  He loved it and today I gave him 2 cubes and he finished it.  

So to get the conversation started, when did you start your baby on solids?  Did you start with a cereal?  If so, what kind?  And what other food did you introduce first?  Ready, set, comment!

5 comments:

Kelly said...

I did it different with all 3. With Malachi (my 3rd) I skipped the rice cereal and oatmeal cereal and went straight for the good stuff. Adding breastmilk to it all is an awesome idea! I highly recommend the "Beaba Babycook Baby Food Maker". Rusty bought it for me when Malachi was born and it made making my own food so much easier. I love reading your blog, you are such a wonderful mom!

greg and ginger o'brien said...

Kelly, thank you so much! You are a pro - I'd LOVE any advice you have to give! I just heard about the Beaba - I think my friend is going to let me borrow hers when she is done! Hope you are doing well!

Jessica Dye said...

1 never did rice cereal because I heard so much about it constipating babies. We started oatmeal cereal from the beginning and Mary Margaret did great with it. I introduced Butternut Squash, avocado, sweet potatoes, apples, bananas....in that order every 3-5 days. I loved making my own baby food--it was a lot of fun. I just used the oven, a steamer pot, and food processor to make my food. Thinning with breast milk is great and you can just adjust the consistency as he gets older. My favorite thing I did was make "breakfast cubes." After I had introduced all the ingredients I wanted, I combined them into a "breakfast cube." MM's favorite was banana pear oatmeal. Happy Cooking!

skf said...

We started L with rice cereal at 4.5 months and then I pureed some pears a week later because the rice cereal tasted like cardboard. She loved her pears. I made almost all her food until about 9-10 months. Good luck! It's so much fun experimenting.

Caroline Cobb Smith said...

Gingy, post some of your favorite baby food recipes for me :) Do you have a Pad Thai recipe for babies?! Ellie's digging avocados. Next up, sweet potatoes. Woo hoo! I'm not the Martha Stewart that you are, but this is still fun.