Once your baby is past 6 months old, milk alone is just not enough. Your baby needs solid food. In fact, between the ages of 4 to 6 months, babies should start getting used to eating solid foods.
Start with a taste of baby food. Just 1 teaspoon in the beginning. Some babies might love these new tastes while other babies may hate it.
Don't fret if your baby refuses these new foods. You could coax baby by adding a little milk to the baby food, so that baby is assured by the familiar taste. For a breastfed baby, add a little breast milk. For a formula fed baby, add a little formula milk to the baby food.
What you feed baby at this tender age makes a difference to his or her future tastes. Give baby greens at this young age so he or she would grow to love veggies.
Sounds far fetched?
With my kids, that is exactly what happened.
Years ago, I was on a health food craze and bought plenty of brocolli baby food for them when they were babies. I practically weaned them onto broccoli.
Fast forward to today. Both kids aged 6 and 7 years old, insist that every meal we have at home must include a plate of broccoli. They love broccoli and would fight over that plate of broccoli.
Here, we have 2 kids at the age where kids are notorious for not touching their veggies, grabbing the broccoli, eyeing what is left on the plate and once we are off guard, one of them would grab the entire plate of broccoli and dump everything on his plate and finish it off. That usually means there wouldn't be any broccoli left for us grown ups.
This is the time to get baby to eat and to appreciate carrots, spinach as well as the usual meats that your family might eat. Tofu would be a great food to introduce to baby as it is soft and very healthy. As baby gets older, a healthy porridge full of veggies and proteins would be really good.
You can find a wide variety of baby food in any shop selling
baby products. For convenience sake, I would buy bottled baby food for my baby. I would use a clean spoon to take out baby's portion for 1 meal and refrigerate the rest. A
microwave oven would heat up that meal nicely. Anything not consumed in 3 days would be thrown away.
Dry cereal baby foods are good too. Add water, mix well and the food is ready to serve.
You can also make your own baby food. For that, you need a baby food maker. That would typically be a
food mill. Just boil the veggies, then use the food maker to grind or chop it into a smooth paste. These baby food kits, with the
baby food recipes and handy tools for baby food making are really handy.
One thing though, baby's immunity isn't as strong as ours, so you have to be very careful about hygiene when you prepare the food. I would sterilize everything I can that comes into contact with baby's food, to keep everything as sterile as possible.
Whether you get ready made baby food or make your own, this is the time to steer your baby towards healthy food. The tastes developed now can make a major difference in the future.
The writer is the webmaster of
Baby Must Haves
which covers what you need when you have a baby.
