Solids = Success?

After last weekend's failure, we decided not to keep up the solids attempts for a while. However, this morning Ethan was grabbing for my food as usual and managed to get my banana to his mouth while my head was turned. Unbeknown to me, he actually bit a chunk off, which he subsequently gagged on and spit out. Once I was sure he was OK (he was completely unfazed), I decided to take advantage of his interest and mash up a piece of my banana for him to try. The first spoonful was spit out, but for once he didn't gag. I kept trying, and finally got him to swallow a bit. His face lit up in a smile, and he opened his mouth for more. After a couple more small bites, he was back to spitting it out, so I decided he was probably ready for his morning nap (which he was). Following his nap, I nursed him, and prior to giving him his first bottle of the day, I decided to try again with the banana. He happily swallowed the remaining spoonfuls (still not much since I didn't mash up too much to begin with), with nary a gag or spit! And some of the spoonfuls were pretty full, so I was quite impressed. He seemed to lose interest around the time I ran out of banana, but he continued to smack his lips and play with his tongue like he does after a nursing session to get the last drops, so I think he might actually like it! At the very least, he's beginning to figure out the mechanics. So we may try again with banana tomorrow in hopes that we can soon graduate back to cereals and sweet potato!

Oh, and to address the old wives' tale that babies shouldn't have fruit as a first food: Breast milk is extremely high in sugar so breastfed babies already have a sweet tooth, thus making fruits a natural choice for a first solid. In fact, more and more studies are showing that (white) rice cereal has no place at all in a baby's diet, yet the same people who say you shouldn't give a baby fruit are usually the same people pushing store-bought rice cereal. For more info on this, check out The WhiteOut Movement.