Solid Food Timeline

Foods To Avoid

Tips

Baby Led Weaning

The idea here is that, in its purest implementation, you skip purees and spoon feeding, and go straight into solid foods. Let the baby try to eat the food themselves. I like some parts of it (meals become playful, get to practice eating and coordination), but its not without drawbacks. The biggest is that your baby had different nutritional needs than an adult, so giving them a smaller version of what the parents are eating isn't sufficient. Particularly for iron, which is not contained in breastmilk. I'm personally in favor of a combo approach. Let's make sure she's getting her nutrients, so we can start with things like cereal, but we can also give her finger foods pretty early on. In the beginning, tasting and exploration are more important than nutrition, the majority of nutrition will still come from breast milk. I'd want to stage it out so that in a meal we're either feeding her a puree or letting her feed herself, trying to move her into

6-9 Months

Let's feed her both purees and some finger foods from dinner. If she takes to finger foods early, great. We'll try to be done with purees by the time she is 9 months old.

For finger foods, we can give her small portions of what we're having if appropriate (not too hard, not too seasoned/spiced). Or we can just give her small bits of easy to manage food on her high chair tray (pieces of apple). A key thing here is that the finger foods are larger than one bite, she should have to gnaw on it. So a bigger piece of apple or something. This will be messy!

Let's wait 3 days before introducing a new food to look for a reaction. Once a food is "OK", we can keep it in the rotation, we don't have to exclusively feed her the new food over those 3 days

Suggested approach: let's try baby-led feeding for two meals (breakfast and dinner), and feed her a puree for lunch.

Stop spoon feeding a puree once she loses interest, don't encourage overeating!

Purees can be batch made and then stored in an ice cube tray! After frozen, can transfer to jars.

For ordering, let's start with cereals, since they get heavily mixed with milk and will help give her iron she needs. Then, let's do veggies (highest potential to dislike), and then move on from there.