My Solid Food Failure

Be green and save green by avoiding packaged foods!  Save time by not making those fruit and veggie purees.  Skip to the next post to learn how.  And for a very simple set of infant feeding ideas, read this post.  This post, however, is about my solid food failures. 

When child #1 was 6 months old, I bought a lot of Earth's Best Organic baby food in those little glass jars.  Some he ate, some he did not.  I also made many purees of fruit and steamed veggies and froze them in little ice cube trays.  Some he ate, many he didn't.  I threw out many of those cubes about a year after I made them and found them in the back of the freezer.  I made most of his "infant cereal" by grinding up different whole grains (barley, rice, millet, etc.) and sometimes legumes and then cooking them in water.  The infant cereal was really my only success.  Baby Bites and Super Baby Food were my basic guides. In general, I was a bit neurotic about the whole thing -- inasmuch as I was trying to follow my doctor's advice:  only introduce one food at a time and then wait 3-4 days, no salt, no choking hazards, wait until X months for Y, etc.

My plan was to begin introducing lots of table foods to my toddler when he was 12-18 months.  Then I got pregnant and very sick for 30+ weeks.  No cooking (or even reheating) was allowed in the house.  My husband bought soup everyday while at work and had sandwiches and salads for dinner.  I'm not sure what the toddler ate -- rice, cereal, bread, yogurt, fruit, I'm guessing.  Fast forward a couple of years -- he still subsists on grains, dairy, nuts and fruit.  No beans, no tofu, no meat and very little of the regular stuff I cook for me and my husband.  In general, my toddler (child #1) is a picky eater and I feel like it's at least partly my fault.

Want to read a story with a happier ending?  Read my next post about my solid food success with baby #2.


How did you introduce solid foods to your baby?

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