Baby food

Eating solids is going great. By the second day of eating solids, Aaron had it down. By the 3rd day, he was eating all the cereal I fed him, leaning forward and opening wide for each bite. I have gradually increased the amount I give him from 1/2 TBSP to 2 TBSP, making it thicker each day.

After a week of rice cereal for breakfast and almost another week of rice cereal for breakfast and dinner, I thought it was time to introduce a new food. Having read conflicting theories on whether giving babies fruits before vegetables makes them like veggies more, and having heard personal accounts, I decided to try out veggies before fruits. I went to the store yesterday and decided on sweet peas by Gerber Organics. The selection of organic single vegetables (not mixed with other veggies or with grains or meat) was slim and peas seemed like a good option. Plus, they were sweet peas, so I thought they couldn't be that bad. Eager to see what he thought, I fed him the peas yesterday evening before his cereal.

I tried to warn him that it was something new and not the cereal he had been eating, but of course he didn't understand. So imagine his surprise when I put the spoonful of peas into his mouth! He looked even more bewildered than when I first gave him cereal. He kind of looked like I had betrayed his trust. But then he opened his mouth for another bite, so I gave him more. He still didn't seem to like it, but he was eating it. But after a few bites, I could tell he wasn't happy with it, despite continuing to open his mouth for more, so we switched to cereal. On the last bite of peas, he finally spit it back out. He must have just figured out how to do it, because he then proceeded to spit out his rice cereal for the first few bites before he finally ate it all down. I am going to try peas again this evening. We'll see how it goes.

Due to the lack of variety of single food organic baby food, I'm going to try to make my own. I had hoped to find squash for one of his first foods, but I only found it mixed in with other vegetables. And I didn't see any pumpkin. I'm introducing one food at a time for a week or so until we are sure there is no adverse reaction. Once he's had a food without reaction, we'll start to mix them together, but until then, it will probably be easier to make our own.