Starting your baby on solids is a major milestone. There are lots of things to consider when offering your baby solid foods especially if your little one is a preemie.
We started Trevor on solids when he was exactly 6 months old. By that time his actual age was only 4 months. A few weeks before he hit his 6 month birthday he was showing signs that he was ready for solids. He was born prematurely at 32 weeks so I had a lot of worries before we started giving him solid foods. He definitely was ready for solid foods.
Tips for Starting Your Baby on Solids
Before we started him on solids, I got a lot of advice from our pediatrician and speech therapist. Since he had been going to speech therapy I wanted to make sure that he was ready to move on to solids. Did you know that if you miss your baby’s cues for solid feeding it might delay them in starting solids?
Make sure they’re ready
The first thing you want to do before starting your baby on solids is make sure they’re ready. If they’re showing cues like reaching for your food or getting hungry in between meals then they’re probably ready for solid foods. Trevor was adamant about wanting to start solids. He would always reach for our food when we were eating, he was hungrier in between bottles and the milk just didn’t seem to be doing it for him anymore.
Keep them on a steady schedule
Creating a feeding schedule is so important. When we first started out, Trevor was only getting purees once a day. We wanted his tummy to get used to purees first before giving him more than that. Once we saw that he was handling it well, we increased it to twice a day. The purees were his snack in between his milk feedings. As he got older and hungrier, his body needed more so we continued to transition him. Eventually by the time he was 1 he was ready for a full solid diet with milk every meal.
Every baby is different so how you transition them will be different. You want to make sure that you’re doing what’s best for your baby. Advice from other parents is awesome but at the end of the day you have to do what’s best for your baby.
Spread out when you’re offering new foods
Introducing new flavors to Trevor was the best part for me. I loved seeing how he enjoyed something or didn’t favor something the first time around. The rule of thumb is that babies will try something 10 or 15 times before they can tell if they like it or not. When you’re offering a new food make sure to spread it out. For example, if you offer green peas on Sunday wait a few days before you introduce them to strawberries. The reason for this is that you want to make sure that you’re baby isn’t having a reaction to any of the foods you’re offering. Doctors typically recommend waiting 5-7 days. We waited 3 days because neither my husband or I have food allergies so the risk of Trevor having allergies is low.
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