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2010Breastfeeding Part 11: Solid Food
I can’t believe the girls are starting on solid food. I just can’t process it! We’ve been doing solids seriously for about 2 weeks now. Avocado, Peas, Apples, Rice Cereal, Sweet Potato and Mango(just tried it today) are on the menu.
Bronwyn really seems to like just about anything we put in her mouth. She grabs the spoon to chew on and suck off of and brings her mouth right to the spoon in excitment. She also screams if I spend too much time feeding her sister in between bites!
Aeralind is starting to like it more. She’s especially drawn to the avocado and peas and generally tolerates plain rice cereal better than her sister.
I feed them solids twice a day. Lunch occurs about 30 minutes after they wake from their first nap and have a good nursing. They also eat dinner with us. That’s usually an hour after a feeding, but it works for us to keep them awake until about 7:30 without having to eat our dinner with them screaming at us.
For me, this is really an odd period. They still depend on me for all of their nutrition. They can’t really sit up in a high chair for very long. They can’t feed themselves. I’m almost amused by it.
So the next stage is the introduction of the Sippy Cup. Any tips on when and how and which cup would be greatly appreciated. For some reason sippy cups scare me 😉
Anonymous
When transitioning to the sippy cup, we found it best to make sure one was available at every solid meal.
You should start with a soft teat spout! It took my daughter a while to get the hang of it. But now she can transition between any sort of sippy cup you give her!
Emily G.
I had a terrible time getting Maria to use a sippy cup until I got Nuby brand cups with soft spouts. We both love them. They have a built in valve so you don’t have to mess with washing it and removing it. The spouts are soft and when I watch Maria drink, it looks like she uses a similar sucking motion to breastfeeding. We started with sippies around 7 months, by giving it to her with each meal. Now, at 13 months though she still nurses she has a sippy available all day long.
Here’s the ones I use:
http://www.toysrus.com/product/index.jsp?productId=3876139&CAWELAID=450068977
I got them at Target.
Chelsea P
We used Nuby with soft spouts too. Honestly because they aren’t as leak proof as they claim and the kids could figure out easily that there was something in there worth sucking for. After they figured it out, we quickly moved on to real leak-proof sippies (I was tired of them getting dropped off high chairs and leaving puddles). We never had any trouble with them preferring one sippy to another, but we started them young (about the age of your girls). Since I was nursing also, from solid food on we just never used a bottle anymore. Expressed milk, water, and water/juice mixed all went in a sippy and there was never any process to break them from a bottle when they turned one and could do milk. I still manage to get away with watering down juice for all our kids (2/3 water to 1/3 juice). They drink it like it’s awesome, and since we do a lot of real fruit, I’m not concerned about them needing nutrition from juice. Someday they’ll care… I’m just waiting for it. :o)
Kingdom Mama
Cute. And ditto on the soft spout sippies.:)
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