So here’s one of my summary things we have learned so far about feeding Evelyn solid food.
Evelyn is picky. I think her middle name should have been “fickle” instead of “Ada”. Her eating preferences change about as often as the surface of Io. Nonetheless she does get a balanced diet as long as we meet a few key criteria.
The main breakthrough to get her started involved feeding her something she was likely to enjoy to start each food group. We initially tried the recommended “cereal first” approach and it backfired … big time. We tried a number of vegetables without any success and finally resorted to fruit as a final option despite the dire warnings of baby feeding “experts”. The key fruit for Evelyn was apple and once she got hooked on very smoothly pureed apple (not too tart, please) we were able to introduce other fruit by first mixing them with apple. The big exception is raspberries and blueberries because she found them too tart unless mixed with an equal portion of something else and it just wasn’t worth the trouble. Once she decided apples and other fruit were ok I chose to go right to yogurt (the cereal was still a failure at that point) because I reasoned it would taste like milk and might be a good base for introducing vegetables and meat.
This assumption turned out to be right but it took a lot of patience to get there. We mixed apples with yogurt at first to get her used to it and soon she would eat plain yogurt. Around the same time we tried sweet potato as her first vegetable and she started to like it very quickly. So now we had fruit, yogurt and sweet potato as “safe” foods in which to mix others. So we started adding all kinds of things to these three bases and it worked most of the time. We tried a lot of tricks to get her used to the taste of other foods, for example we would start with mostly fruit and add a bit of egg yolk. Once she got used to the taste of the mix we would add more egg yolk and keep increasing it until she started to get annoyed, then back off a bit. Or we would do the “double dip” approach where we would take a spoon of meat/veggie mix and dip the end in fruit.
With respect to grains, she already had preferences for the kind of cereal we gave her so it took a lot of testing to get the right one. She wouldn’t eat cereal flakes mixed with water at first so we would just add 1 teaspoon of dry cereal to a tablespoon of fruit or sweet potato and she started to get used to it. We can now give her cereal mixed with fruit and half an egg yolk in the morning and she seems to enjoy it. Also because she wanted to have control by feeding herself Cheerios were a good choice since and she usually has some twice a day.
For lunch and supper she usually as a mix of vegetables and meat (with yogurt or fruit added as required) followed by fruit puree with or without the rest of her egg yolk. Today she ate puree zucchini, potato and sweet potato mixed with cooked whole green lentils and small pieces of beef. Yes I know that sounds revolting… but she happily ate it as long as there was enough yogurt mixed in! This was followed by pureed peaches mixed with half an egg yolk and then some cheerios and slices of grape. Ending the meal with finger foods is nice because I can relax and let her do the work and if she doesn’t finish them they can be saved for later.
At first I felt really guilty giving her these mixes since I felt like I was giving in to her demands and that she was eating too many sweet things. However after a few weeks of self induced purgatory of trying to give her vegetables and meat without either yogurt or fruit, I have decided that it’s ok to respect her preferences (to some extent) and that I also need to preserve my sanity. So maybe by giving her apples first in the beginning we have developed her sweet tooth but I think it’s more likely she already had that preference and wasn’t willing to budge. Evelyn’s doctor is very impressed that we have managed to get her eating the foods and portions she is supposed to have for her age in only 2 months so I would say it has been a big success.
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