Solids

There are so many things I learned...learning while raising Gabriela Zoe. I cannot help but attribute some of the success I have had to family and friends, some on reading Babywise I and II but most of it to God. Gabriela Zoe is a 10 months old baby healthy, growing and full of life!!!....she also eats everything mommy gives her :o) That...did not just happen!!! She did all the yukky faces babies do but we worked through them. First of all it helped me to realize that a yukky face may mean to me 'i don't like it' but really to her it means 'oh...i don't know it'.
We started cereal at five months because I had felt it in my heart to start at that age before she was born...and after she was born I was proven right because she started to have problems with weight gain. I cannot say that we had problems with cereal because she absolutely enjoyed it. She did make a little yukky face when it became thicker but after a few prodings she learned to like it also. For the timeline I followed the babywise method, which, I believe that even my pediatrician would be happy with :o) We had cereal for four weeks...first week for dinner, second week for lunch and dinner, third week breakfast, lunch and dinner. Fourth week I tried a different grain...oatmeal. (She was ready for a change and gulped the oatmeal down so fast I could not believe it) Here is a funny story: one day I decided to try her rice cereal to see how it tasted. "mmm so sweet" I thought "off with the cream of wheat in with rice cereal...it is so much sweeter" About two minutes after the thought I realized that the sweetness came from the breastmilk...since we started mixing the cereal with formula instead I have found that to be ever more true! So here it goes: what helped her transition to cereal was the at first I mixed with with expressed breastmilk...a familiar sweet taste!
At the end of the four weeks she was ready for veggies, and to the pediatrician's joy, she was six months! But at the pediatrician's dismay I followed a La Leche League advice and the first veggie was mashed avocado. There are many patterns out there for introducing new foods for allergic and tolerance reasons...my husband and I agreed on every four days. I served the veggie for lunch and dinner BEFORE cereal (I knew she liked cereal, when i gave it to her before the veggies, like babywise suggested I found that she was full and would not take the veggies, if I gave the veggies first she was more hungry and I knew no matter what she would eat the cereal) I got all the yukky faces...for THREE days, and at lunch time it was always worst than dinner. I learned that tiny bitty bites are so much easier to go down when starting with something new (I am thanful for my small tiny gerber spoons) I would try to give her as much as I could within about half an hour (or as much patience as I had at the time) and I kept in mind that even if she only got a few bites it was simply an introduction and I did not expect her to eat the whole tablespoon I offered (if she finished it we celebrated) Then we had green beans and peas, sweet potatoes, carrots, bananas, apples and pears.
After all those I felt like I had covered the bases and then the menu went as such...lunch-veggie, cereal, fruit, dinner-veggie, cereal (even though babywise suggested the fruit for dinner I found that since we eat dinner a little later the sugar in the fruit wound her up at night). I still follow that pattern and planning for the next month and a half when my daughter is ! year old. I'll see what I'll do after that. I occasionally intruduced new veggies, especially when we went to Greece like zucchini, squash, mashed potatoes, asparagus, brussel sprouts. I made a promise to myself that I would not give my daughter anything that I thought was detestable. I found that even the organic versions even though their single ingredient foods (which I still use on occasion) taste good when they start combinin...yuk!! I do a better job combining veggies that taste good together. At about 9 months I decided why not...eat from our food that is seasoned...and she eats both our salted food and her unsalted veggies just the same. Do I still get the weird moods where she does not want to try something or pretend she does not want it? YES but I perservere and she discovers she likes it.
Ex. a couple of days ago I decided to make chicken soup because we were all coming down...at first she kept pushing the spoon, turning her head, making a yuk face...and she didn't even have a bite! After several no's for her bad behavior I gave her a few spoonfools of cereal and then sneak in a spoonfull of soup...she spit it out (a new trick she learned, which we are working at breaking) and then she started picking them up from her bib to put them back in the mouth because she realized she liked it! After that she drank so much soup it made her mommy happy o)
I hope all this helps at least one of you in one way or another! God be with you!