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The first food that my son ate was a pringle. I kid you not, he was 4 months old and sitting on a close friends lap when he reached up and grabbed the pringle she was eating directly from her mouth. He promptly stuck it in his mouth and began gnawing on it like he knew exactly what he was doing. No teeth, never having even been offered solid food before, he went to town. My level of shock was an 11/10 at that moment. Watching my son handle that pringle like a champ was the solidification of my drive to implement baby led weaning into our lifestyle. Then promptly taking the pringle away to prevent him from suffocating.
When you have multiples figuring out a way to simplify meal time is a critical part of surviving that first year. During the introduction of solids you end up changing your babies's schedule, which for multiple parents is the key to survival, and want to make the transition as painless as possible. Baby led weaning is my way to simplify our meals, while still focusing on getting my kids their much needed nutrition for growth and development. Baby led weaning has also given us the structure from the beginning to make meals an unplugged family affair, something that we wanted to implement early on in our children's lives. I would not change the decision to start baby led weaning and want to share with you the benefits to doing baby led weaning with multiples.
This will be a two part series where we focus on introducing new foods to your multiples. We will start by looking at when you should introduce solids to your babies and what types of solids you should be introducing at each stage. Next week we will cover ways to simplify baby led weaning by creating weekly meal plans that have you and your baby eating the same food. This is also a great system for anyone who wants to make baby food at home as you can use what you are already cooking in a blender for your babies, the steps are the same just the way each baby consumes the food is different. Investing in a baby bullet can make this process of providing your baby with home cooked food easier and less time consuming than pulling out an entire blender. So let's get started.
When should I start my twins on solids?
When to start your babies on solid food is a decision between you and your doctor. However it is a conversion that you should be well prepared for as you know your babies better than anyone else. Take the time and do your research before speaking to your doctors. One helpful site to do this research is google scholar, where you can look at peer reviewed documents on any scientific study. I also highly recommend looking at mommy blogs about baby led weaning or one of my personal favorites, joining a baby led weaning facebook group to ask questions from other moms who have already gone through the process or are about to go through the process. It is a great way to get support as you learn what works for you and your family.
Most doctors are going to recommend that you start introducing solids at 6 months of age and this is a great way to determine your starting time as you pre plan your upcoming schedule changes. Starting your twins at 6 months means that they will be old enough to sit up on their own, which reduces the chances of choking. Your twins will also be at an age where their bodies are able to process solid foods and have the physical ability to understand the chewing action, even though they may not have any teeth yet.
We personally did not follow this guideline because as stated in the intro my son was showing signs of readiness by the age of 4 months old. We were comfortable with the knowledge that he knew how to chewy and sit up earlier than the 6 month recommendation. Honestly by 6 months he had already taken down a plate of BBQ and coleslaw at a family reunion. One thing I did make sure to do was bring starting at 4 months up with his doctor, who gave us the all clear to start solids when each baby showed that they were ready for this process, which meant that we went through the process of introducing foods twice.
Our daughter was 7.5 months old when she finally showed interest in starting solid foods, and we waited that long before giving her food at meal times. We would make our food as normal, separating out our son's portion, and set everyone up at the table for dinner. Our daughter was given a bottle of milk or water depending on her age at the time, or just given a plastic spoon to play with while we ate. I highly recommend asking your other mom friends with older children if they have any kid silverware they would be will to pass on as a way to reduce waste and save you money. We loved the atmosphere of everyone eating together because it provided us with a structured schedule change for both twins. A necessity at each stage of twin parenting as previously mentioned. Our daughter got use to having meal times with us which I feel encouraged her to be interested in solids by 7.5 months of age, earlier then if she had been separated from us during family meal times. We also loved seeing how the twins interacted with each other during meal times as from 4 to 6 months they were pretty good at reacting to each others facial expressions everytime our son tried a new food. These interactions will change as they age, and right now at one year old they are often sharing food or fighting over food depending on what is for dinner. Broccoli is something that none of my kids will eat, so it is often shared between them and the dog before being left for the vacuum cleaner after dinner.
As we transition into what to feed your babies I want to bring up the fact that when your babies first starts solids they will not need to eat table food three times a day. During that 4 to 8 month range my kids at only dinner or breakfast, never both. They were given breastmilk the rest of the time as their main source of subsistence. It is Important that the milk you give to your baby will be their main source of nutrition, calories, and fat during the first year of life. Remember that food before one is just for fun and often times learning adult behavior, so only having one table food meal a day is perfectly acceptable. It was around 8 months when we started doing breakfast and dinner each day as this was around the time we also adjusted down to shorter nap times. We waited to introduce lunch till around 10 months of age as they were normally asleep during this meal anyways. This is currently our shortest meal of the day and we always have milk available to supplement the kids during this meal. Remember that my kids may not follow the same schedule as your kids as the timing of when they want to start having two or three meals a day is unique to each child. So be sure to pay attention and adjust according, as well as talk to your doctor, because I haven't said that enough.
What should I be feeding my baby at each stage?
Figuring out what you should be feeding your twins is not as hard as it seams when you first start looking into baby led weaning. My number one trick to understand what food you should be preparing, is to simply walk down the aisle labeled baby in the grocery store. Luckily for us baby food companies like Gerber have provided a simple outline for us to mimic by labeling their baby food into three or four stages of introduction and then giving them age recommendations. This takes all the hard work out of figuring out what to feed you baby. However, If you aren't looking to spend 20 minutes in the baby food aisle then following these four stages of introduction will give you a great outline for what types of food to be preparing food for your baby.
Stage one in feeding your new eater is to start with vegetables, specifically root vegetable. This will be the first 3 weeks to 1 month of baby led weaning. Root vegetables are able to be cooked down till they are extremely soft, cut up into small bite size pieces for baby hands, and do not have the stringy pieces or seeds presents in many vegetables that are choking hazards for your babies. We personally started with carrots, sweet potatoes, and fingerling potatoes. Mainly because I thought the babies could hold on to them better than rustic potatoes, which are a great option as well. These options gave us a variety of items to mix into our meal plans, and we could prepare multiple baby servings in one meal prep then store them in the fridge for the next few days. So if we had carrots as a side on Monday we could have spaghetti on Tuesday and the babies could still have carrots on Tuesday. If you are like me and prefer your veggies seasoned then feel free to add seasoning to your veggies just in lighter amounts than you would usually use. You can also prepare half with seasoning and half without, which is what we did when I would make honey coated carrots. Pro tip honey is dangerous for babies under one year of age, please google this for confirmation. Again make sure you are cutting everything into bite size baby pieces, this means 12 to 15 pieces from a single sweet potato, cutting each baby carrots in half, and cutting fingerling potatoes into 4 pieces.I personally threw the food into the freezer to cool down and cut them after they were cooked. I also was huge about removing the sweet potatoes skin, though I did not do this for the fingerling potatoes. As for equipment, if you don't have one this is also a good time to invest in a steamer, or you can just bake the vegetables until they are soft enough to eat. I personally just like variety of being able to do both.
Stage two is introducing fruit to your babies, focusing on soft easy to eat fruit. This will be about that 3 week to 8 week mark. This is also a great time to introduce healthy fats like avocados to your babies. We started with bananas as they come pre softened for time saving purposed, they are also a great baby led weaning staple item. We also introduced grapes that were cut in half for tiny baby fingers as they were easy to gum into a pulp. Cutting your grapes in half reduces the chances of your baby choking on a small round object. This is also when I introduced applesauce, as it was conveniently fall time anyways, and pumpkin puree. The applesauce and pumpkin were messy at first, but are a great mixer for the instant baby oatmeal what we used to start the introduction of grains around 8 months old for our son and around 9 months old for our daughter.
Stage three is grains, including oatmeal, pasta, soft bread, and all the other goodies that we all love to eat so much. This will be about the 6 week to 12 week mark after starting vegetables. We did start with baby oatmeal, I would go back and forth on feeding this to them myself or just letting them eat it with their hands. Honestly it usually came down to a time factor on which method I preferred. This is also when we started eating more rice meals as a family, mixing in tomatoes, beans, mushrooms, and peppers for flavor. I was never shy with spices as I figured if I liked food with spices so would my children and I was very much right as once species were added they became 100x better at consuming food. We also use puffs as a pre meal grain, there are packaged items from the store that are mostly just air with a dissolvable surrounding. The puff course is still extremely popular in out home. Grains were the item that really sparked our children to want more food, which shows they take after their mama. I mean bread is life right?
Stage four is introducing meat to your children. This will be 8 weeks to 18 weeks after vegetable, depending the speed that your child moves through each item. This was done on different levels for each one of our twins. Our son started with pork and beef, something we were eating more often during those early fall days. I kinda regret giving him such dense meats at the start as he had a hard time processing them through his systems. So we adjusted for our daughter who was given chicken at first, and pork then beef a week or so later. She did not have as many digestive issue with the chicken which made our lives a lot easier in the diaper changing area of the world.
Right now at a year old my kids will eat just about anything. Excluding broccoli of course, and I truly credit baby led weaning with their love of different foods. We loved the process and felt that it took the pressure off of us as parents during meal times as we could give our children the food we were already eating and let them feed themselves. This is honestly not a new process, mainly because blenders are not as old as human beginning, so people were feeding their children long ago with this method under a different name. I personally would have called it the "Making sure my kids don't die" system, and used it daily and often. Not much different from my life right now.
If you have questions about baby led weaning I want to hear from you, so head over to the anchor app to leave me a voice message or send me a message on this blog! You can even leave a comment below and I love reading your comments! If you are interested in other topics about raising twins then head over the my podcast available on google podcast, spotify, and anchor podcast app and subscribe to keep up to date with me! I would also love if you could share this podcast with your friends on facebook, instagram, or twitter to help new moms find us as we build our twingineering community. We are looking to have the podcast up on apple podcast within the next few weeks, at which time we would love to have you leave us a rating. Thank you so much for reading and we can't wait to keep problem solving motherhood with you.
This blog is available in podcast form at https://open.spotify.com/show/4r83HA0mj4XLkcCquroCmK
Additional Baby Led Weaning Resources at https://ijponline.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s13052-018-0487-8
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