Food, Glorious Food

When I was in 5th grade, I participated in an optional school choir called "ET Singers". It was called that because we met Early Thursdays before school. Get it? HA! Anyway... we would preform at nursing homes, the mall, the park, wherever the music teacher could bribe someone to let a rowdy bunch of 5th graders sing. I was never a very good singer, still am not. But I do love to sing. The theme of our performance as an "ET Singer" was food. All the songs were about food or something related to it. I got this e-mail from a friend with a newborn and felt inspired to write a post about FOOD.

HOW do you do it? How long do you JUST do rice cereal? (I have heard 2-4 weeks) Do you only do it morning and night? Do you always nurse/bottle feed after rice cereal? When you introduce food (we will say carrots...since that is where we are) :) --- Do you do rice cereal only in the morning and only carrots in the evening...or do you ALWAYS mix rice cereal with carrots? When do you start mixing foods like- carrots in the morning and peas in the evening? When is it that you do the "stage 2" foods like "turkey and gravy" - just after you have tried all the others? And when do you do 3 meals a day - with nursing/bottle as snacks inbetween? WHAT IS THE FOOD SCHEDULE FOR BABIES?!?!

There are about 12 questions in that one paragraph, but I will do my best to cover them all. And please, you other moms out there, give us some input. Every baby is different and reacts differently. We need lots of help for this one!!

Okay... Sara had a little trouble when she was first born with her tummy, so the doctor recommended waiting until she was the full 6 months old before introducing rice cereal. I planned to take his advice until I met an African woman at the WIC office. I had to watch a nutrition video and she was there with her 4 children watching it also. We got to chatting, because that's just what I do, and her 4 month old was sleeping through the night. I was totally jealous and wanted to know her secret. She told me that she was giving him rice cereal before bed. I decided to throw my doctors advice out the window because I was just that desperate for sleep. I went home that night and tried to feed Sara rice cereal in the bottle. I only put a tiny bit in because I wanted to see how she would react to it. After she sucked on the bottle for about 10 minutes, I realized not an ounce of it was gone. Apparently, you are supposed to buy special nipples for rice cereal because it clogs the regular ones. Duh! Someone should have told me that. ;) Anyway... I decided to just snip the top and see how it went. She seemed to be eating it just fine, but instead of sleeping through the night, she was up ALL night crying with a bad tummy ache. I vowed then and there to listen to my doctor more faithfully.

I did wait until Sara was about 5 1/2 months and introduced rice cereal in a bowl. I would feed it to her with a spoon and she really liked it. I mixed it with a little bit of warm water and fed it to her at breakfast time and dinner time. We did that for about a month and then I started mixing it with peas, beans, or applesauce and giving it to her at breakfast, lunch, and dinner times. I was still giving her a bottle before each nap, but added in the 'solids' at meal times. I've also heard to do green foods first, oranges next. So we stuck with the green and applesauce for a while, but I noticed she was getting constipated more, so then I started adding yogurt. I did oatmeal mixed with yogurt for breakfast, bottle for nap, rice cereal and something else for lunch, bottle for nap, rice cereal and something else for dinner, then bottle for bedtime. I think we continued with this routine for a couple of months and it seemed to be going really well for her.

Once she was really good at eating the 3 solid meals a day with the rice cereal and greens, I introduced the oranges, bananas, little pieces of string cheese. You can start with the puff cereals for snacks as soon as they start crawling, which Sara didn't do until 10 months, but I started them at about 8 months because Sara had several teeth. I slowly introduced other foods she could tolerate, small pieces of bread, smashed banana, canned pears, applesauce, yogurt, anything else I felt like she could eat without choking. When Sara dropped her morning nap, she naturally went to only having a bottle at her 1 nap and bedtime. We continued with that until she was about 14 months. We dropped the bottle completely, but now she gets a sippy cup of milk with her lunch and dinner.

I think the key is that every baby is different and every small transition takes time. If your baby is struggling with rice cereal, wait a few weeks and try again. If they don't like a particular kind of food, try again the next day. I heard once that a baby has to see a food 5 times before they are comfortable enough to try it. So keep pushing them to try new things, but make sure they are safe eating it. Watch for reactions to different types of foods. If you have allergies to foods, your children are more prone to it. Sara isn't allergic to anything and never had a reaction to foods, so I felt comfortable closing the gap on introducing new things. We didn't always wait the full 2 weeks before we'd start something else, but you do what works for you. Just be patient with it and they will figure it out.