So we’re bad parents. We were supposed to wait until six months before offering Dalton any “solid” food and we broke down tonight at the five and one half month mark. Dalty has been intently watching us eat for over a month now with occasional grabs for plates of food and serving utensils. It’s been clear that he has really wanted to try what we have been eating.
Cat mixed up some mashed banana with breast milk tonight and the entire family crowded around for the show. He was all over it. He doesn’t yet know how to get food off the spoon, but he was reaching for it each time and helping Cat guide it into his mouth.
This post’s picture was taken by either his aunt Laura or his aunt Jessica. I’m not sure which, but I’m sure they will let me know in the morning. It doesn’t quite do justice to the level of enthusiasm that Dalton had for the experience.
We’ve been holding off because the current thinking (at least in the books we read) is that you want to wait on solid food until the babies stomach lining has sufficiently matured such that it won’t let large protein fragments into the blood stream. The hypothesis here is that large protein fragments in the blood could elicit an immune response and lead to future allergies. At six months, the stomach lining of an infant has developed such that this is not considered to be a great risk. We’re only two weeks short on six months (less than 10%) and he’s really quite a physically advanced baby.
Ok, I still feel guilty…
No comments:
Post a Comment