Starting your baby on solids is a joyous milestone of messy and tasty fun. The introduction of solids should be slow and you should allow 3 – 4 days between the introduction of other foods for the first time into your toddler’s diet, to give yourself time to detect any possible allergies and to help you isolate what those allergies could be from. Your toddler should be ready to begin eating solids at around 6 – 7 months old, and you can begin introducing your little one to more bland foods at first, such as mashed potatoes made with either breast milk or formula, a bit soupy. You can then graduate to baby cereals such as rice or oatmeal, also using breast milk or formula at first.
Once your baby has gotten used to the consistency of mashed potatoes and baby cereal, you can begin introducing other types of foods such as purees. You can allow your toddler to taste fruit purees such as applesauce or toddler bananas, and stick to stage one purees that will be exactly the right consistency for your toddler’s new palette. After your little one has gotten used to those foods, maybe in about 2 – 3 weeks, you can begin introducing pureed veggies as well as crackers and breads. These will become mushy in your little one’s mouth when mixed with her saliva and will ensure that she will not choke.
After baby has gotten used to these for quite a while, you can begin offering another variety of foods after he turns 1 year old. At this point, baby’s digestive tract will have grown more accustomed to solid foods and the bacteria necessary to break down the food completely will have grown at a reasonable rate to digest meats and cheeses. Be sure to cut up meats like hotdogs into very small pieces so that your toddler will not choke on them, and give your toddler cheese sticks or large cheese cubes to prevent swallowing them whole.
After this point, your baby will be able to handle many other different types of foods. You can begin offering cut up apple and even small orange slices. If you feed your toddler banana as a solid food, be sure to give banana in moderation as the concentration of potassium can be much too high. Your toddler will have a lot of fun trying different types of solid foods. Let your toddler try using a spoon to feed himself and see how much more fun he has.
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