Julie's Boggle

Jonathan was 7 months old yesterday and has been on “solids” for just over a month. As it happens, this fits in with the modern thinking on the best age to introduce solid foods, but really it’s because when we tried before, we just got lots of drooling and not much interest.

Just after Christmas, we tried Jon on the time-honoured, favourite first food of baby rice mixed with formula and this was received favourably.

From there we rapidly moved on to trying puréed carrots followed by all the other “first taste” vegetables (butternut, swede, sweet potato, parsnip) as recommended by baby-food guru Annabel Karmel in the handy book we got for Christmas.

(I avoided fruit for a little while because of a suspicion — this happened with a friend’s baby — that arousing Jon’s sweet tooth too early might cause him to reject vegetables, but this was a needless concern, Jon pretty much eats everything we’ve tried so far. )

We’d introduced the rice at lunch time, but as we moved onto vegetables, the rice (or alternative porridge, like millet) moved to the later feed with just veggies at lunch. And not long after, I did notice that Jon was ferociously hungry in between his two morning feeds (07h00 and 10h30), which apparently is the sign for more food in the mornings. So began the next step of following his early morning breast feeding with some baby oats.

This leaves us with a schedule adjusted as follows:

07h00: Full breast-feed (i.e. until he tires of it or the milk runs out) followed by 40ml baby oats at 08h15 after Mom and Dad have eaten and Dad’s left for work.

11h30-ish: Half a breast-feed followed by 2 “cubes” (baby food frozen in ice-cube trays – each of these weighs about 27g) of a protein-based vegetable dish (we haven’t progressed past chicken yet) and another 2 cubes of different mixed vegetable purées. Then 15g of fruit fromage frais, or baby yoghurt as we call it.

14h45: Full breast-feed although he doesn’t usually take as much at this time.

17h30: 30ml baby porridge (rice or millet) made with formula and 2 cubes of puréed fruit mix (or half a small banana) with another 10ml porridge mixed into it. And sometimes some plain yoghurt too, to dilute the sweetness further.

18h30: Full breast-feed after his bath.

22h30: Ever decreasing amounts (we’re down to 100ml now) of formula from a bottle.

So far everything we’ve tried has gone done relatively well. Jon got into the slightly frustrating habit of blowing raspberries early into his sixth month and when combined with a wet mouthful of puréed broccoli or “sweet vegetable medley” this does tend to leave one wanting a large apron or a perspex shield!

Fortunately he’s mostly too busy enjoying his food to think about making any noises other than shrilling for more if he thinks we’re taking too long between mouthfuls or courses.

In the early days, we had to make do with feeding Jon supported on the couch or in his bouncy chair, but I managed to secure a Bumbo baby seat (what he’s sitting in in the above photo) for cheapish on Ebay and this made a huge difference in the mess-factor.

Overall, introducing solids has been fun in terms of trying new things and creating some variation in our day… But it’s also a fair amount of extra work in organising the ingredients and preparing his meals!

Finally, for those of you who don’t mind the 8MB download and want to watch a little clip of Jon eating his morning porridge (apologies, he’s a little camera-focussed when it’s around), then you can download a clip here.

WARNING: I haven’t managed to make the video play on Windows XP in anything other than Picasa so sadly there’s a good chance it might not work for you if you don’t have Picasa to watch it. (If anyone has any good tips on compressing camera-taken movies I’d LOVE to hear them.)

UPDATE: Thanks to all the commenters. It seems like “VLC” is the free video player of choice, and it definitely plays this video. The Windows VLC download is under 10MB and can be found here.