How often to feed solids to 6 month old?
My daughter is 5 1/2 months old and we just started rice cereal once a day. My plan is to introduce fruits and vegetables at 6 months. I am wondering how much food versus breast milk she should be getting? One of my books has a whole meal plan with a breakfast, lunch, and dinner menu along with breastmilk and another book I have says to start with one meal a day for a week and then keep upping it so that at 8 months you are feeding almost all solids with a few breastmilk "snacks".
And should we be giving her more than one rice cereal each day?
1 Answers
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One rule of thumb I found helpful was that solids for babies under 1 are really just practice in eating, and introductions to new flavor sensations. There's almost no nutritional value that they require from solids, and breastmilk or formula is really the main thing, still, for quite awhile.
That helped me not worry about how much was actually "making it in" or how well rounded my offerings needed to be. The only thing I worried about was trying to make sure my first foods weren't unnaturally sweet, served solids once a day for the practice, and started adding more solid meal times slowly over time. Sorry, can't give you a timetable (never had one myself)!
The one thing that caught us off guard was that our second child was so eager and "good at" consuming solids at around 6 months that she quickly became constipated on rice cereal (and banana, when we added that), and so we switched to oatmeal well before we finished the rice cereal box, moved to more applesauce and less banana, and started constraining portions and re-increasing breastmilk and formula (partly by giving her liquids before solids at each meal).
