Solid Food

Some Americans start their babies on vegetables, and some start their babies on fruit.  Many of the books recommend vegetables so the baby will have the sweet tasting foods after trying vegetables.  Hungarians start their babies on fruit, with apple typically being the first one.  This is more due to constipation that can occur when the baby eats only vegetables.

It seems like everyone is so eager to start their children on solid foods.  We are not parents who look forward to that, so we wait as long as possible.  We’ve thought it was so much easier to just nurse.  It’s faster, less messy, and you can do it anywhere (at least over here in Europe).  We chose with Ethan and Sienna to wait until they were 6 months to begin solid foods. We decided to start rice cereal a few days before Sienna turned 6 months so Stephanie could be there and experience this with us.  It took her longer than we expected to get the hang of this food thing. I wanted to start her on butternut squash for her next solid, but you can’t get them in Hungary this time of year.  We were pretty random with Ethan’s next solid (We gave him pears because we had about 65 people at our home for a pot luck and someone left a bunch of pears, so we decided to give those to him.)  With Sienna we knew we were leaving a few days later for Albania, so we just did carrots and thought we would try to take some with us for the first day there.While in Albania we bought bananas and smushed them in a bowl.  Because we could not drink the water, we decided to even buy a jug of bottled water to wash her bowl and spoon each day.

I look forward to being in the States during the time that she should be trying lots of different foods.  I LOVED that with Ethan.  We can only buy the fruits and veggies that are in season here.  I did puree some asparagus and some seasonal fruits this summer so she could have some of them in the winter.