Infant and Toddler Food

From birth to 6 months, the only food an infant needs is milk, and the best milk is breast milk. So during the first 6 months, mothers only need to concentrate on producing enough nutritious breast milk for her baby (by eating, drinking and resting enough). Breast milk is easily absorbed and digested. It also helps the infant to build a stronger immune system. In general, an infant who is being breastfed exclusively does not need to be fed any other liquid. Only those who are on formula feeding need to drink water to avoid constipation.

Generally, doctors do not advise any solid food before an infant is 6 months old as the body may not be ready yet. From the age of 6 months, as the first solid food, start with something creamy and smooth in texture. The easiest food to prepare is ripe bananas. Use a spoon to mash it and it's ready for feeding! Ripe pears is another option. Start with 1-2 spoons and slowly introduce more. Let the baby have some water after the feed.

The other type of food is homemade puree - our favourites were carrots and pumpkins (other options include potatoes and apples). Boil them until they are tender. Use blender to blend them and the food is ready. I usually prepared a few days' portion together, put them into small containers, kept them in the fridge or freezer, and consumed within 3-7 days. Some people make the food into ice cubes and keep in freezer so that it can last longer, and use a few cubes per feed after warming them up. It is not necessary and not advisable to add any other ingredients like salt and sugar to the puree - they are not good for health. Introduce one new food at a time, with the interval of at least 4 days to let the baby get used to it. In case there is any problems arise (like diarrhea and allergy), it is also easy to know which food may be causing it.

With the same method, we also prepared porridge from 7 months onwards (boil, blend, freeze). We usually fed the baby a mix of porridge with the puree. The former is almost tasteless and the latter can be very sweet (especially pumpkins), so mixing them together make the taste just nice.

From around 8 months, we started to cook porridge everyday for the baby. It was not time consuming with the help of a slow cooker. We used the smallest size of Panasonic slow cooker (1.5L) to cook the porridge. Generally we will put in 3 things into the porridge. First would be a small piece of either pork or chicken meat to add flavor to the porridge. Second would be small pieces of chopped vege - our favourites were cabbage and Chinese cabbage as they don't oxidize easily. Third would be a piece of fish. Put all these with rice and water into the slow cooker in the morning and by noon (after a few hours) the meal is ready. The remaining portion can be kept and reheated for dinner.

In general, from age 1, kids can start taking rice. Just make sure the rice is not too hard/dry and prepare some dish suitable for them like soup, steam pumpkin and steam egg.

For the sake of convenience especially when going out, we also used commercial instant baby food. we found that the local brand of (Malaysia) baby cereals were usually too sweet. My favourite brands were Gerber and Heinz, as I have high confidence in them (as opposed to products from China). We used the jar food which looks like the one on the right. They come in many varieties of flavors including vegetables. What I did was to scoop out the portion to be consumed into a bowl using a clean spoon and feed from the bowl instead of feeding directly from the bottle so that the remaining is not contaminated and can be kept in the fridge for the next meal. As my child grew older they consumed one bottle per feed. Sometimes I also offered the jelly type (fruit flavor) as a desert. As a substitute for the proddige, we used rice cereal that comes in powdery form (also from Gerber/Heinz). Some of them are flavored but I normally used the plain one and mixed with the jar of baby food. Usually, when eating out, I'll bring some powder in a small container and a jar of baby food. During meal time, I just added water to the rice powder to make it into "porridge", and then added the baby food flavor.

As finger food, we bought some baby biscuits for the baby to hold in his/her hand and munch. You can also prepare your own finger food by cutting fruits and cooked/steam vegetables to suitable sizes for the baby.

When introducing new food, it is also important to watch out for food allergies, and introduce the food in stages, especially eggs, nuts and seafood. I may touch on that on my next blog...