Baby food

It's been a real education learning from Amanda how different infant care is now, compared to the dark ages when I was a baby. Almost as soon as we came home from the hospital, our Moms' were told to lace our bottles with cereal to help us "sleep longer." Ha! I wonder if it worked? Most of us got our first solid food within a few weeks (no one completely trusted breast feeding) and it always started with cereal and tasty things like sweetened condensed milk, fruit and pudding. Infants were put on a feeding and sleeping schedule, and left to cry it out in-between. Somehow we survived, many of us even thriving on to the brink of old age :-)

But these ideas didn't always make sense. Nature intended babies to feed whenever they were hungry, and there's no particular reason why cereal is a better first food than anything else. In every culture throughout history, babies were weaned onto what their parents ate. John swears he was weaned on pasta fazool. Which could explain a lot!

The older generation might be surprised to hear that avocado and cooked egg yolk are now considered good first foods, along with just about anything else ground up. There's nothing wrong with rice cereal, except as Amanda points out, it has little nutritional value except calories. Her doctor suggested avoiding pureed fruit, because babies love it and can get a picky, sweet tooth if they have it first. But back to the avocado...did Nova like it? Nope, Amanda said she spit that first taste right out!