Hi mamas! It's been a minute, I know. Been a little crazed lately. I'm a new mom, you understand. So it's just about the end of the first month of solids and so far so good. I see this time as my baby learning how to eat food with a spoon, instead of just breast milk through a bottle or breast. That to say that giving her solids is still not quite helping with having enough milk pumped and bottled for her. I'm still having an issue with that, because she's still just as hungry even after I give her solids. And my milk supply is still low, and it even started to decrease by about one ounce when I pump sometimes...arggh! I really hope I can keep up and continue to have enough milk because I want to stick to my promise of breastfeeding her for one year. Only five more months to go yipee. I can do this!! Who's with me?? :-D
The last you heard, she was not feeling the squash, oh no sirree. She was also not feeling the carrots and I was having a hard time getting her to eat at all during that week. But, along came the fab moms over at
SocialMoms.com and viola! I got a great, über simple recipe from
Mommypants! for brown rice cereal. I tried it, and oh my goodness my baby loved it! I mean, I kinda knew that cereal was a no brainer, most all babies love baby cereal or rice cereal. But I was really trying to get her to eat her vegetables first, before I introduced the easy stuff, like cereal or fruit. It got to be a challenge to get her to eat though, and after six months, babies need more than just breast milk, because breast milk alone is no longer substantial for their growing bodies. So I made this brown rice cereal for her, and mixed in a little breast milk to purée it with and it worked. She has been eating pretty good now and today was the first day she had the full three meals, breakfast, lunch and dinner, woo hoo! I would say she ate about 1 1/2 tablespoons total today.
I've been giving her nothing but the brown rice cereal for over 10 days now and it seems to be working. Two things I noticed:
1) The switching new foods every 3 or 4 days I think is too soon. This eating solids with a spoon thing is so new and foreign to babies who've been nothing but breastfeed for the past six months, that I think the baby needs time to get used to the foods. I don't think it helps to keep switching it up on them so soon. When I continued to just give her the brown rice cereal for almost two weeks now, it really helped to get her accustomed to it and she knows what to expect now.
2) I noticed she actually preferred the food with a little more texture and not so finely puréed. Some of the food I made came out too runny or liquidy, and she really didn't like that. But when I loosely smashed the brown rice cereal with a fork, instead of putting it in a food processor, she really liked that, she liked the bits of soft rice better.
I also just started to add some puréed green beans to the brown rice and it's going great! She is back to eating some veggies, along with the brown rice cereal. So happy to be feeding her such healthy food. And of course, always give them some water to wash the food down when they're done, so they don't get constipated. This also helped with that. When I do manage to get her to eat the three meals of solids a day, I try to make sure she drinks 2 ounces of water that day. This I noticed helps her to not get constipated and have an adequate poopy diaper. Who would've ever thought we'd be monitoring poopies right. Lol! Welcome to motherhood :-D
