*Review Book c/o Author. may include affiliate links in post.
A new baby coming is an exciting event. And those first months can be a blissful, albeit tiring, time in your life. One of the scarier challenges that presents itself is when baby is ready to eat solids. Suddenly, the easy breast or bottle feeding is no longer easy when doctor’s lists and unsolicited advice places feeding fear in a new parent. There is so much constantly changing information (and opinions) it can be overwhelming to get your baby started on solids. It is easy to simply default to jarred foods, but you don’t have to if homemade is more your forte!
Remember, any food aside from breast milk or formula in the first 12 months is just for fun and taste. The venture into solids does not replace breast or bottle, so there is not really any reason stress. Have fun with it!
Don’t know where to start? Feeding Baby: A Cookbook by Clancy Cash Harrison can guide the way. This book can help you navigate how to add solids to your baby’s diet with information and recipes that will prove valuable well into toddlerhood.
Feeding Baby offers simple, yet interesting baby food recipes that involve various flavors and textures. From purees to mechanicalized varieties for older infants and toddlers, the recipes can remain a mainstay in your child’s diet well beyond the baby phase. The suggestions for a sensory diet are interesting to me since my son has always had various reactions to textures. My second child was easy when it came to introducing solids. She was the type to snag items off of our plates starting at just four months old. The girl was gumming up steak at a hilariously young age. It was a good thing too, since she was a very fussy breast and bottle feeder. My first born was a whole other story. He liked his liquid nutrition and had no interest in solids until he turned year old. Looking back, I would have enjoyed the nifty chart offered in Feeding Baby to help with introducing more flavors, plus herb and spice pairings.
My kids are big on berry smoothies,so incorporating some recipes has been easy. Over all, I like that this author can help people not be afraid of flavor. I find that to be a big issue when it comes to baby foods, as well as specialized elderly adult diets. We default to bland pairings, which makes the foods not very enticing, and then we end up with “picky eaters”. It doesn’t have to be that way!
*We received a review copy of the book in exchange for this article. All opinions are our own.