Meal time!

Well, as you saw in the Bonus Post this past week, we started solids. Like I mentioned, we just felt it was time, even though we had wanted to hold out until Tyler was 6 months old (mainly to help with possible food allergies). But our little boy seemed ready NOW, not 3 weeks from now, and we gave it a go! At his 4 month pediatrician appointment, we were told that we could start solids at 5 months and were given the guidelines on how to do it. Start with rice cereal, move to veggies (preferably oranges and yellows), then fruits (just because some babies will favor the sweetness and start to reject veggies), wait 3-4 days between foods to look for symptoms of allergies. So we started with very runny rice cereal on Tuesday. He slurped it right up! We slowly made it a bit thicker, and the response was hit-or-miss. Sometimes he really seemed to enjoy himself, and others he didn't seem to like it at all. Ah, the joys of trying something new!

But since we had been on just plain rice cereal for a few days and saw no adverse reactions (other than some very smelly gas and some "interesting" looking poop), we decided to embark on the next portion of our journey. We introduced our little man to squash tonight. I started him out with some plain squash, and as he kept eating, I mixed it up with some rice cereal too. He LOVED it!! (And I have to admit, it tasted a lot better than I thought it would, and I don't eat squash. I have made it a habit to taste EVERYTHING that Tyler tastes - Tylenol, rice cereal, gas drops, even breastmilk.) We decided to feed him in just his diaper tonight. Now that we're adding color to the food, it's just as easy to throw his little butt in the tub. Good thing....he had squash EVERYWHERE. Travis had his work cut out for him on bath duty tonight.

So provided that we have no strange reactions to the squash, we'll head to carrots or sweet potatoes later this week. We don't anticipate any issues, as neither Travis nor I have any food allergies. We'll finish up these orange veggies and then we'll start to add bananas or apples to the cereal or oatmeal. Before you know it, our little man will be ordering a steak dinner!!!