What Do I Feed My Daughter??

Anything in small bites is good. My son is also 11 months. He eats Cheerios, puffs, chicken, brocoli, carrots, peppers, rice (harder to pick up), noodles, animal & graham crackers, grapes, blueberries, peas (even though they are not his favorite :-). You have so many options. Just make everything small.

hot dogs (sliced length wise into quarters then diced into smaller pieces about 1/4 inch wide), spaggetti,( cut up into smaller pieces, and have a bath planned), Mac and cheese (cut up into smaller pieces)

Does she have any teeth? You could try diced up chicken and see if she can handle it yet...
Ravioli (small ones diced into 6 pieces)

apple chunks, peach chunks, pretty much anything that gets softish when introduced to a mouth. :-)

Hi there.

Baby wants to eat what mama eats! It's no problem. If she is eating the cheese and banasa and crackers fine, then she can handle other stuff. Cooked veggies...brocolli, peas, corn, parsnips, carrots... anything!

My daughter never ate purees, she has eaten table food since 6 months as I followed 'baby led weaning'. She is now 15 months old and eats virtually anything.

Through the day I offer snacks of cold chicken (I buy a cooked roaster cut it up and have it in a tupperware container in the fridge), cereal bars, cheese sticks, egg yolk for breakfast, french toast fingers, fruit, humus and pita, basically anything I would eat. (just not the sugary stuff I would eat! lol)

Sounds like your daughter is ready to expand her food offerings. Have fun!

Hi J.,
I always fed my boys whatever we were eating just cut very small. I would not give her any bananas or cheese to start out with. Give her what you have and hopefully she will try it. I have read that you have to give kids a food 8-10 times before they may like it. My boys really liked rice so I would mix veggies (carrots, cut up broc, red and green peppers) in there and they loved it. Try not to stress out to much about it. Do your best to feed her healthy.
Chris

You can feed her the same things that you eat. Cut the meats really small and across the grain. Make sure everything is cooked well and chopped up small. This works great to get you to eat better too, it did for me. You can save a small corner of your chicken or whatever meat for lunch the next day. Just cut it up very small and put it in a container. It will be quick and easy to pop in the microwave for 10 seconds. Cooked pasta, canned, or fresh cooked carrots, baby sweet peas, grean beans, even steak if it is cut small enough and across the grain.

My test was always that if I could put it in the roof of my mouth and mash it up with my tongue and have it easily break apart and mash, without becoming balled up (like bread might do) then it was safe for my little ones. This seemed to work well for us.

steamed broccoli, steamed carrots, chopped grapes, yogurt, chopped chicken breast, noodles. I hope that helps a little. You can basically feed her whatever you eat only chop it finely.

Give her little bits of what you are eating as long as it's easy enough to be chewed (not like chunks of chicken until she gets some molars in there). My daughter loved green beans, carrots, peas, broccoli, pears, apples, mandarin oranges, etc. We'd just buy cans of all sorts of stuff and supplement the stuff we were eating that she could eat with additional fruits & veggies so she'd get a good variety (since we like a lot of stuff she couldn't eat yet i.e. tacos, bbq chicken, stuff that was hard to chew). Most stores have cans of fruit that are "in pear juice" or whatever rather than "in syrup" so there's not added sugar. Same for veggies - you can get unsalted green beans & corn & peas.

Just take a bite of whatever you're going to give her and if it doesn't take too much effort to chew it, it's good to go!

EDIT: Cheese! All kinds of cheese is fun to eat! Another tip- sometimes after a while my daughter would stop eating things so I would change how I cut them up and she'd eat them again. If I used to cut it into cubes, I'd cut it in to little strips or whatever.

Sounds like your daughter is progressing normally. I can remember when my son would only eat cheese! LOL He grew out of it.

You might consider a quality multi-vitamin if you are really worried. I know a great one if you want advice.

S.

at that age that is what my daughter ate and she is fine
maybe try peas my daughters lunch was usually a handful of peas and chesse. i also cut up frozen waffles, my daugheter had a lot of teeth so it was easy she could eat whatever we ate.

She can eat just about anything that you can eat. Just cook the veggies a little more, and cut things up a little smaller for her. One thing that my kids always liked was meatloaf. It was really easy for them to eat, and I felt good it wasn't just "meat". My kids would also eat an entire can of green beans if I let them (just rinse them out if they aren't "no salt added") Even when they don't have teeth, their gums are really hard, so it is almost like they have teeth. Just remember no nuts, raisins, peanut butter (talk to your doctor about when), honey. Just start out easy, and she'll get used to eating. Try noodles, different cereals, canned veggies, cooked broccoli (a favorite), grapes cut in quarters, strawberries, ham, pancakes. My now 13 month old just had her first apple over the weekend. She loved holding onto it herself and taking bites. Of course, I watched her like a hawk, but she did great. She also stole her sister's fork the other day and used it perfectly on her ham. You can also try drinkable yogurt (teach her how to drink from a straw by holding your finger over one end, and putting the other end in her mouth). You can take Yobaby yogurts, mix in a little milk or formula and put it in a take n toss straw cup. That's also get her ready for the milk transition. My kids ditched baby food by 9 months, and they are both great eaters now. Sometimes we could feed them a little if we gave them a spoon (or two) to hold.

How about just giving her all table food - whatever you and the rest of the family eat but chopped up really small. WHen you make casseroles etc don't salt them - salt them afterwards for you. Other ideas - all cooked veggies with a little melted butter or grated cheese on, mashed or chopped up pieces of avocado, cottage cheese, little pieces of chopped up cold meats etc - good luck - Alison

Hi J., I, too, would recommend just feeding her what you eat yourself. When my kids were little, I would put frozen peas and corn on their highchair trays while I was making dinner. I would also make casseroles and then puree a serving in a mini-food processor. Good use of leftovers also.

I'd like to suggest a couple of great websites. First is www.askdrsears.com. I have the pleasure of working with Dr. Bill. He and his wife have authored over 30 books and he also contributes to Baby Talk and Parents magazines. You might also want to look at www.strongbones.org to read why you might want to wait awhile before introducing cows milk to your baby. Cows milk is known to cause multiple allergies and is thought to be the cause for many cases of Type 1 diabetes. If you explore this website, you can also find tons of other great health info, www.pcrm.org.

Dr. Sears and I also recommend great nutritional support from a whole food supplement, made from 15 different fruits and vegetables. It is backed by several original studies showing numerous health benefits, including DNA repair, stronger and balanced immune system and free radical damage reduced by as much as 75%. Feel free to contact me if you would like to know more.

Good luck, and have fun. In health, D. ###-###-####
www.dianeshealthed.com

This may sound strange, but my girls loved liverwurst when they were that age. I would buy a big chunk of it, unsliced and cut it into bite-sized cubes.
Their second favorite were cucumbers.
We had a little food grinder and whatever we had for our meals, the girls got the same thing, only ground up so that they could eat it. I'm sure the home-cooking was more appealing than the babyfood, as they never refused to eat.
K

Advocados, pasta, cooked carrots, cooked green beans, grapes cut up into at least 8 pieces per grape, anything you are feeding her in baby food just cook it and cut it into tiny pieces.

scrambled eggs, diced ham, gerber meat sticks
diced baked potato, penne pasta sliced up smaller, any vegetable, peas, carrots, brocolli, zuchinni,
you make a soft taco, fold it in half, and cut it into little squares with a pizza cutter...you can do pizzas of any kind, and cut them in the same way. make sandwiches on tortillas and cut them tiny.
mandarin oranges are perfect...super soft and kids love them.
bananas, cooked apples

Don't worry about her wanting regular food! My daughter (now 20 months) refused to eat more than 2 or 3 tiny spoonfuls of baby-food. I started giving her teeny tiny pieces of food off of my plate (at 6 months old) and she did fine ... she's now 25, almost 26 pounds. She may like adult hamburger or spaghetti a lot better than the jarred stuff, I mean, let's face it, that jarred baby food smells almost as bad as the cat food I feed my cats. lol

It looks like you have been getting some great responses and I just wanted to add that part of the problem is probably that the jar baby food is pretty bland and now that she has gotten a taste of the good stuff she doesn't want to go back. One of the things that my daughter loved at this age (and still does) was avocado. I would just dice it small for her and I read a tip that if it is hard to pick up you can roll it in crushed cheerios for extra grip. We only did this once because it was kind of a hassle. Anyway, she loved that. We were giving our daughter just about everything that we were eating, just in small pieces, and she eats tons of different things now. She is not picky at all. Just remember to be careful about choking hazards, example be sure to cut grapes. I would cut them lengthwise and then into small pieces. You could even start by giving a chunky puree of table foods and slowly graduating to finger foods. Good luck!

At 10 mos my daughter was eating only "table" food. She refused baby food. Give her what you eat.

My daughter is now 13 mos and loves fruit, canned and fresh, esp. grapes, cheese, crackers, chicken, spagetti (buy the bowties, rotini, mac so you don't have to cut), all types of veggies...just cut everything small and don't be discouraged.

J. -

Ha! All I can do is laugh (sorry, don't mean it in a bad way), but it sounds like your 11 month old is exhibiting signs of rebellious toddlerhood already! Really, food is not something you should waste energy battling over. As long as your child is eating healthy foods (bananas and cheese are great!) it is totally fine if that's all she eats 24/7. Just keep introducing new foods along with her favorite and one of these days she'll surprise you and only want to eat pb&j!

At that age, my boys loved yogurt, too...

Take care
Dana

At 11 months she can eat just about anything... feed her what you are eating..

Canned veggies are great right from the can. Or steam veggies extra extra well done and give her those..

Pasta and rice are great. small pieces of chicken turkey or ground beef.

Many babies are off baby food long before 1 year old..

Just put small pieces of soft food on her high chair tray and let her eat..

try other fruits, like berries, any veggies cooked soft, tortillas with cream cheese folded up, scrambled eggs, overcooked noodles...