Weaning - Westbury,NY

If your plan is to wait four days between introducing new foods, here is an example of what you can do.

Monday...gave cereal.
(Tue, Wed, Thur...cereal. You will have noticed by now if baby has a bad reaction to cereal, or whatever food you are giving.)
On Friday, you can introduce a new food. So say, you give bananas. Now you feed baby bananas AND cereal for Fri, Sat, Sun, and Monday. You notice baby has an upset stomach, is fussy, etc...you can assume it is the bananas, because you had no trouble with the cereal.

At the beginning of each four days, you can introduce a new food as well as continue to give baby everything you have given up to that point.

Baby shouldnt have anything other than formula or breastmilk until 6 months old. Then you can start introducing food. The reason why you wait a few days is to be sure if baby has an allergic reaction, you want to be sure you know what food it is that caused the reaction.

Another way to do it is called baby led weaning. Just continue to nurse your baby on demand and start giving him small bites of whatever you are eating as long as it is soft enough for baby to gum and doesnt contain anything harmful to baby, like raw honey or undercooked meats. This way you skip most of the cereal and puree food and baby just eats what you do. It is harder to watch for allergies this way though.

I did baby led weaning with my second child, and more traditional (jarred food and cereal, new food every 4 days) approach with my older daughter. Both ways worked out fine. I started both kids on simple veggies and fruits, like sweet potatoes and applesauce before cereal. Just be sure you wait until 6 months old before giving anything. Once they are around 9 - 10 months they can have almost anything you are having as long as it is cut up.or mashed up into small pieces.

You don't have to wean yet = a year minimum is recommended by the
AMA, 2 years by WHO.

check with la Leche League and get all the facts before you defacto cut your baby off of milk altogether.

don't shortchange your baby!

if you start a nfew food, 3 days is the wait to find out if there is an allergy.

cereal is the least nutritious food you can give your child! far better to give veggies mashed first. steer away from fruits and meats until your child is much older. weaning is a process that starts with food, ends with cessation of milk.

Your milk is far more nutritious and better digested for your child than any food you put on their plate.

good luck,
M.

This "rule" was intended to make sure the baby isn't allergic to the food. If the baby had a reaction, it would be easier to pinpoint the source if he had only received one food in the last four days. However, I personally ignored that rule, because I was so excited to get my son to try new foods, and I know other people who also ignored it. Also, I don't know if you know this, but most of the updated baby care books do NOT recommend cereal as a first food, but rather fruit or vegetables (well pureed of course!) I started my son with pears.

You are building up what baby eats. So if you give cereal and all is well, add to that another food a few days later. This is to check for allergies. My daughter is allergic to apples and it was hard to pin down because by the time we realized it, there were several other things she'd been introduced to (medicines, for example) and it could have been any one of them. One food at a time early on is not entirely mandatory, but it does help figure out if baby can't tolerate peas or something. As baby gets the hang of solids, start giving baby finger foods. Introduce him/her to food from your own plate. And realize that kids are weird. They may love a food one day and hate it the next. Just keep trying.

I didn't do the 4 day rule. My Dr said to try veggies first because if sweeter food, like fruit, is given then alot of times they will not eat veggies. She told me to start with carrots and then greenbeans. My dd favorite was squash. I learned right away that she hated bananas. If food had bananas in it she could tell and wouldn't eat it. She's 6 and still will not eat bananas. I started giving my dd cereal at 3 months because she really didn't care for the bottle. Good luck.