Starting Solids: Our Journey With Purees + Baby Led Weaning

ByAbby Saylor Armbruster

I get lots of questions from you guys every time I post about solids on my Instagram story, so I thought doing a blog post on how we’ve gotten started + how we plan to move forward would be helpful!

PUREES

When Clay turned 4 months old, her pediatrician said we could begin introducing purees and cereal, which we decided to move forward with to get our feet wet with the whole food thing. She had only ever had my breastmilk, so preparing food for her felt like totally new (but exciting!) territory. I decided to make her purees myself, and we purchased store-bought jars for some of the more complicated ones to make or for the foods that weren’t in season to prepare fresh (prunes and peaches).

I made her purees with the standard NutriBullet that we already owned, mixing them with baby-safe water to thin them down. I stored the purees with this kit, which I LOVE. It has little date dials on them so you can mark when they were made. My go-to purees to make have been:

  • Banana
  • Avocado
  • Apple (peel and blend)
  • Pear (peel and blend)
  • Blueberry
  • Mango
  • Carrot (boil and blend)

Luckily, Clay loves food, so this whole experience of getting to see her try and enjoy new foods has been so fun. I’d give her two jars of purees a day, one around lunchtime and one around dinner time, each about 1 hour after breastfeeding. I would also try to give her food that would help her poop every other feeding, like peaches, pears or prunes. I mark what she ate, how much and what time she ate in the Baby Tracker app, which we use to track her naps and breastfeeding too. Tracking it helped us so if she were to have a reaction (she didn’t, thankfully), we could figure out what it was from.

BABY LED WEANING

Before having Clay, BLW is something I knew I wanted to do with my future baby. I’m certainly not a pro at it and I’ve gathered the info I do have on it from our pediatrician and resources online. I thought I might be interested in taking an online course, but right now, I feel comfortable with the free information I’ve researched — I recommend doing whatever feels right for you! The major things I wanted to be aware of were what foods to start with, how to add new ones, how to cut/prep foods and gagging vs. choking.

I really enjoyed these videos on the basics of how to get started:

We started this week and the first foods we began with BLW style were:

  • Banana
  • Apple
  • Avocado
  • Peanut butter toast

The next ones I want her to try are:

  • Eggs
  • Yogurt
  • Tree nuts: cashew butter, walnut butter, almond butter
  • Meat

It’s my understanding that you should wait 2-3 days before introducing brand new foods at the beginning with BLW, so she hasn’t tried too many things yet. It’s kind of scary at first because you’re worried about them choking, but I was so surprised to see that she had mastered peanut butter toast by the second time we gave it to her. It’s crazy how quickly babies can learn and adapt! Such a proud mom moment. 🥺 It’s so fun to have her at the table eating with us too!

FAVORITE PRODUCTS

SHOPPING LIST

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That’s where we’re at with solids! It’s been so fun to incorporate food into her routine and watch her experience new flavors and textures. Do you plan to do BLW too? If you’ve already started, how has your experience been? Leave a comment below! Thanks for reading & check back for another new post soon!