Thursday 8 December 2011

Food, glorious food

We took the baby in to the clinic to be weighed a fortnight ago, and she had gained a little less than 100g in two weeks. The nurse seemed a little concerned, but indicated that breastfed babies don't necessarily follow the percentile curve, and have more of a step-up pattern in their growth (a quick google backed this up).

I took her in again today and she had gained more than 200g over the last fortnight, which is great. She's currently weighing in at over 7.5kg, but 150g of that is her harness.

I told the nurse that I was relieved - I was worried that her slow weight gain the other week meant that we were doing something wrong with the solids. I told her that we've been feeding her twice a day on most days, with farex and with pureed vegetables.

The nurse told me:
 - it's time for us to move away from puree and on to mashed foods - we need to leave some lumps in, but we could transition by mixing puree and lumpy (otherwise she will have trouble moving off puree)
 - we should give her water with her solids, so that she gets used to drinking water
 - twice a day is fine, at six months we should move on to three times a day and more 'finger' food
 - she doesn't have to stick to veg now, we can give her pretty much anything (other than egg white, honey or peanut butter)
 - she suggested we try yoghurt, custard, tuna mornay, casserole meat...

It's crazy to think that it's already been a month that we've been doing solids. It feels like we had been progressing nicely, but seems we could have been moving faster - things are really about to ramp up.

I had a rough idea this might be coming after another friend had indicated that while at a stay-in sleep clinic the nurses were giving her 5.5mth baby toast, muffins and cake. She now gives her baby three meals a day - for breakfast the other day her baby had toast, rice cereal and half a banana.

My baby could be eating toast in a fortnight...!

No comments:

Post a Comment