Introducing solids to your baby? How exciting!

Introducing solids to your baby in these first weeks are about new tastes, feeling new textures and learning how to deal with eating from a spoon – quite different from the breast or the bottle. That’s quite a lot for a 5 to 6 month-old to deal with.

No need to rush, start with a teaspoon of rice cereal in the middle of a feed and increase the amount each day. Then it’s on to more new tastes such as sweet potato, pear, apple, zucchini, banana, broccoli and the whole range of vegetables and fruits.

Remember to introduce one food at a time for the first month or so.  If your baby has a reaction to a new food, you will know that it is the new food. After 2 or 3 days of each new food, add another one.

Learning to take solids is not just about nutrition. Your infant is also learning to distinguish taste, texture and colour. So when you present foods, keep them separate, don’t mix everything into a big mush. This way your infant will experience the difference tastes and textures of the white stuff compared to the yellow stuff and how this is different from the green stuff.