New Foods

On Thursday of last week, Mel took Emma to the doctor for her nine-month check-up. While there we were told that Emma should now be eating stage three foods instead of the stage two foods we had been feeding her. So the past week, we have begun feeding Emma some Gerber Stage 3 baby food. Emma hadn't had any problems recently with the stage two foods she had been eating, but getting her to eat the stage three foods has been a bit of a struggle, especially the chunkier foods.

I have tried a couple different techniques to get Emma to eat her chunkier stage three foods the past couple days before coming up with a plan which worked quite well tonight. First, I let Emma play with a second spoon. When she tried to put her spoon in her mouth, I stuck the spoon with the food on it into her mouth. Next, I noticed that when I wiped her face with a damp paper towel to clean her up, she would open her mouth, so I started doing that, inserting the spoon of food when her mouth was open. That worked alright, but she caught on pretty quickly. Finally this evening, while trying to feed her the Gerber broccoli and carrots with cheese, I started alternating spoonfuls of the vegetables with spoonfuls of banana, which she likes. This actually seemed to work quite well. I will have to try it again tomorrow. Hopefully though, she will soon begin to actually like the chunkier vegetables and meat entrees.