Mixing up the menu
If your baby is accepting gentle tastes and smooth textures quite easily, now’s the time to start moving on to the next stage, beginning to introduce more adventurous tastes and mashed textures.
Nutrition
No single food can give your baby all the nutrients needed; variety is the name of the game to make sure they get the right balance of vitamins and minerals, as well as the energy required for all that growing and exploring. It’s especially important to make sure their food and milk contain a healthy amount of iron, as the natural iron stores they were born with begin to run low after about 6 months.
Your baby will now be having 2-3 solid meals as well as the breast milk or infant formula feeds.
Milk is still an important part of your baby’s diet and they’ll need around 600 – 800 ml a day, including the milk you use to make their food.
Offer complementary foods after breast milk or infant formula.
Taste
It’s important to excite their curious taste buds at this stage and help them learn to enjoy even more foods. That’s because by the age of 2 your baby’s tastes can become relatively fixed until they’re around 8 years old.
Texture
From this time they will be ready for slightly more textured foods, it’s more about mashed textures gradually becoming lumpier, rather than chunks, this encourages biting and chewing, will help with teething and later with talking.
Your baby’s coordination may also be improving, so once they are able to grasp and hold objects now’s the time to begin introducing finger foods. Small pieces of cooked, mixed vegetables and little cubes of fruit are ideal to start with.
Avoid hard foods that are likely to cause choking.
Appropriate Foods
Continue with stage one foods with the addition of the following foods:
- Increase the variety of vegetables and fruit to include cooked cauliflower, parsnips, yams, broccoli, and green beans, melon, plums (remove skin)
- Add fish
- New Zealand regulations recommend whole cooked eggs
- Australia regulations recommend adding cooked egg yolk
- Include cooked pasta and noodles, soy foods such as tofu and tempeh
- Age appropriate infant cereals, rusks, crackers, bread (white or wholemeal only)
- Yoghurt, cheese, grated cheese, and cottage cheese