Peanut Butter Oatmeal
Goals - October 2013

Starting Solid Food

Dashfirstsolids

Have you heard of the progressive new movement in which you feed your baby his first solids with a spatula? No? Well, it's the hip new thing to do when you sit down to feed your baby and realize that you do not, in fact, own a baby spoon of any kind. Sorry, Dash! 

I've been meaning to order a set of utensils from At Home with Montessori but obviously have not checked that off my to-do list. So we were caught off guard this weekend when we started Dash on solids. He's just shy of his six month birthday but is showing all the signs of readiness that I wrote we wanted to see. Since we felt he was ready it worked out perfectly because my parents were in town and it was fun to experience with them. And by perfectly I mean except for that one little thing about feeding our baby with a spatula.

I previously wrote that I wasn't sure if we'd do baby led weaning or purees and whether or not we would do any rice cereal. We've decided to a combo of purees and baby led weaning and Chris really wanted to include some rice cereal that is fortified with iron and DHA. We'll do mostly small bits or purees of veggies and fruits with rice cereal occasionally for the nutrients. For Dash's first food we mashed up some avocado and fed it to him on our post-modern baby spoon (ahem). We let him reach out to grab the spatula and bring it to his mouth.

Yuckface

{not so sure} 

We've been talking excitedly about starting solids and sort of didn't think about the fact that we'll continue to feed Dash food. So I realized this weekend, "OK, so we're doing this...then what?" and told Chris we'd better think about it! Luckily there's not too much to it. Our plan is to make our own baby food by mashing or pureeing steamed veggies and fruits and we'll aim to feed Dashiell once a day. We're also planning to include some different flavors like cinnamon and curry in some of the purees.

Speaking of food, we plan to raise Dashiell vegetarian including eating eggs and dairy, which is how we eat now. When he's old enough to drink milk other than breastmilk we plan to give him almond milk or another alternative to cow's milk since we don't drink cow's milk. If Dash wants to eat meat when he's older that will be fine with us. We want to educate him about where his food comes from (keeping things age-appropriate, of course) but want to encourage him to be independent and decide for himself how he will eat. We are planning to only serve vegetarian meals at the house but we will find good quality meat for him to try if he wants to or if he wants to eat meat at a friend's house, for instance, that will be fine. It's nothing we're going to stress over. 

Oh, and we're definitely planning to buy a baby spoon.

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