Well, this week I read up on baby feeding, and discovered that Baby is old enough not only to eat cereal and mushed-up veggies, but also pureed meats and even finger foods (goodness knows she has enough teeth to eat a pastrami sandwich - #5 and #6 made their appearance in her lower gum this week). So I determined that I would start spoonfeeding more and nursing less.
There's just one problem:
Joy's still not that into eating from a spoon. She'll open wide for the first bite or two, push most of that food back out with her tongue, then refuse to open again. Not in a "don't wanna!" sort of way, but in a "ho hum - there must be something around here more interesting than a spoon with bland mush on it" sort of way.
So far, the best strategy I've developed for getting food into her mouth is to give her an extra baby spoon or other easily-washed item, then slip my laden spoon into her mouth when she opens to chew on her toy. Sneaky, I know, but it's the best I can think of right now.Trouble is, I wonder whether I'm sending the right message. Should I just quit after her one or two conscious bites so she at least learns that eating is a voluntary thing? Or should I just keep shoving food in at unexpected moments so she gets used to eating? Any thoughts or suggestions would be very welcome.
In the meantime, I've at least figured one thing out. Joy hates having her face wiped, but if I start cleaning her up with two wet cloths and let her have one of them to suck on, I can scrub all day with the other and she doesn't mind a bit. At least meals end on a good note.
7 comments:
From my experience with my nephews and some reading I've done. It takes about 15 times for baby to get used to the taste of different foods before they like them. I also tried the suck on wash cloth trick it only works for a while until baby isn't interested anymore. I've learned that Ryker my youngest nephew enjoys feeding himself more then when I feed him so I make sure he only has a diaper on and is in the kitchen high chair before I give him something to eat. Other wise when I do feed him he just isn't interested.
This is a tough situation and I faced something similar with Archer. By the time he was Joy's age we had nursing down to a science and it was so easy and convenient and that is just what he preferred. Archer didn't want to eat anything else. Period. So I turned to quite a few people for some ideas on how to approach this. I realized that I was still nursing him like when he was a newborn which was constantly. I was nursing him so often that he just wasn't hungry. So when I tried to feed him baby food, he knew that he could hold out for something better. So I cut nursing down to 3 or 4 feedings a day. Once in the morning after I fed him cereal, once after a nap, and once before bed time. Obviously this was what worked for me, and it may not work for you. But it is worth a try. Cereal was also a struggle for us and I often skipped it. My pediatrician warned me about iron deficiency in breast fed babies and urged me to be more diligent in feeding Archer iron fortified cereal. One last thing, when Archer was teething he HATED eating solids. I found if I kept up with the pain medication (Motrin worked well for us) he was a little more willing to eat. Hope this offered you some ideas. WIth kids, even seemingly simple things are extremely complicated!
It took Sophie a long time, too! I was just consistent- "feeding" her two times a day (even if none of it went down) and finally she caught on & started enjoying it!
Just a thought-- are you sure its the spoon and not the food itself she is resisting? Georgia didn't eat real food until she was 9 months old. I tried feeding her baby food at 6 months, and she was never interested. I found out later that she just wasn't fond of the mushiness of pureed baby foods. I had been afraid to feed her "adult" foods until that point because I was afraid she would choke. Turns out she was more capable than I had thought of eating cheerios, dried fruit puffs, and chewing soft-but-not-mushy foods like cooked carrots, cottage cheese, real oatmeal with brown sugar, quartered grapes, etc. She was MUCH happier with this chunkier, textured food and developed quite an appetite once I gave up on trying to feed her "baby" foods.
By the way, with those kinds of foods, you don't even need a spoon! Just let her use her fingers. :)
That Chad comment was from Caitlin. Forgot to log on.
Thanks for the advice, everyone. Sounds like time and persistence are going to be the key here. After a while, simple familiarity may make eating more appealing.
Carrie, Phillip has been trying to feed Joy table food for months now (mostly to tease me, I suspect :). Maybe I'll start letting him actually do it. I draw the line at Doritos, though.
Post a Comment