Getting more adventurous!
As your baby moves a few steps closer to enjoying family meals, you can start to mix up the menu but bear in mind that your baby’s needs are very different to an adult’s.
Nutrition
Even though your baby’s tastes might be getting a little more grown-up and they can now cope with quite chunky food, many adult foods still aren’t appropriate for them as they contain too much salt, sugar or fibre. Offer a wide variety of foods - cereal and dairy at breakfast, plenty of protein and vegetables for their main meal and fruit and dairy for dessert. This will help provide a good balance of the vitamins and minerals, proteins and fats they need to help them grow.
Your baby will now be having 3 solid meals plus 1-2 snacks as required.
Their breast milk or infant formula feeds will continue.
Offer complementary foods before breast milk or infant formula.
Taste
At this stage, you can begin to introduce your baby to more complex recipes that combine different flavours. You could include some of the herbs and spices used in family meals.
Foods like spaghetti bolognaise, vegetable casseroles, mixed fruit desserts, and fruity breakfasts will encourage them to grow to love a healthy variety of food in the future.
Texture
Introducing more chopped, roughly mashed textures and bigger pieces will help continue the development of their chewing skills and speech muscles.
Giving them finger foods like fresh fruit pieces, strips of vegetables or cubes or sticks of cheese will also help them continue to develop their hand and eye co-ordination.
Continue to encourage your baby to feed themselves, while this is often a messy process it’s so important for their development.
Appropriate Foods
Continue all the stage two foods with the addition of the following foods:
- Raw or cooked tomatoes, cucumber, celery, Brussels sprouts, silverbeet and spinach, creamed corn, peas, mushrooms, legumes
- Increase the variety of fruit and include oranges, mandarins, kiwifruit, pineapples and berry fruit
- Breakfast cereals such as porridge, wheat biscuits, puffed wheat, and infant muesli can be introduced to give variety for your baby’s breakfast times
- You can now use whole cows' milk in cooking (eg. for custards and milk puddings), but not as a main milk drink
- Peanut butter (talk to your health care professional before introducing peanut butter)