What to Expect the First Year (94 page)

• Nurse when he's sleepy. Breastfeed first thing in the morning, before all his busy-baby cylinders kick in. Breastfeed after a warm bath at night. Or after a relaxing massage. Or right before naptime. If he's tired enough, he might not mind braking for breast.

• Or nurse on the run. Some babies prefer to know that they're part of the action—that way they can be sure they're not missing something. If that's the case with your little bundle of energy, nurse while you're walking around the house. Securing baby in a sling will be easier on your arms.

Baby's still not taking breastfeeding lying down—or even sitting up? You can lead a baby to the breast, but you can't always make him drink—especially if he's emotionally ready to move on. If you've exhausted the options for winning him back over to breast, consider pumping at least some of his daily quota of breast milk and serving it up in a bottle. More work for you, but more freedom of movement for him—and that might be especially appealing during those extra wriggly times of the day. Save breastfeeding sessions for when he's mellow or too sleepy to put up a fight. He's never taken a bottle? No point in starting now—after all, the AAP recommends weaning from the bottle at 12 months anyway. Use a cup for breast milk—just make sure he gets enough this way.

If you do end up weaning to formula, try to do so gradually. Gradual weaning will allow baby time to increase his intake of formula before he gives up breast milk entirely (you can mix them to start). And it will give your breasts the chance to put the brakes on production slowly, which will help you avoid painful engorgement. (
Click here
for tips on weaning. If your baby absolutely refuses to take any breastfeedings,
click here
for making abrupt weaning easier.)

“When I first introduced solids, my daughter seemed to lap up everything I gave her. But lately, it seems she won't eat anything but puffs, and if I'm lucky, a little banana.”

So your baby's gone from “open wide” to “clamped shut”? That often happens once the novelty of spoon-fed solids (and sitting still for them) wears off. Happily, there's no need to worry about her suddenly picky ways—for three reassuring reasons. First, healthy little ones who are allowed to eat to appetite tend to eat as much as they need to grow and thrive. Second, those nibbles typically add up faster than parents usually realize. Third, your baby is still getting the bulk of her nutrients from breast milk or formula. While a variety of solids help round out her nutritional requirements—and new tastes and textures provide valuable eating experience—breast milk or formula can still pick up the slack.

As she passes the 9-month mark and begins to close in on her first birthday, your baby's requirement for breast milk or formula will ultimately decrease, and solids will ultimately become the mainstay of her daily diet—a nutritional must-have, instead of the nutritional gravy they are now. Even then, as long as she's getting the growing job done, you can leave stress about her solids intake (how much, which kind) off the menu. Instead, try these feeding strategies for pumping up your picky eater's nutritional intake … and maybe even have her opening wide to a wider range of foods:

Let 'em eat bread …
or cereal, or bananas, or whatever food she favors. Many babies and toddlers seem to be on a food-of-the-week (or month) plan, refusing to eat anything but a single selection during that time. And it's fine to respect your little one's dietary preferences and aversions, even when taken to extremes: cereal for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, for example. Eventually, if given a chance to do so on her own—and if offered a wide variety of foods to choose from—your baby will expand her repertoire of tastes.

… but maybe not cake.
Tiny tummies can handle only so much food—and let's face it, given a choice between filling up on cookies or steamed carrots, few babies will reach for the carrot (and really, would you?). Offer only healthy foods, and your baby (and later, toddler) will have no choice but to choose a healthy food every time … even if it's the same healthy food over and over again.

Add on when you can.
While you shouldn't push food on your baby, there's nothing wrong with trying to sneak it by her. Serve her cereal and slip in a serving of fruit in the form of a diced banana, applesauce, or cooked, diced peaches. If it's bread your baby craves, spread it with mashed banana or ricotta, or melt a thin slice of swiss
on it. Or turn it into French toast. Or try baking and buying breads that incorporate other nutritious ingredients, such as pumpkin, carrot, cheese, or fruit.

Offer what you're having.
A side of cauliflower with that cereal? Sure, why not? Babies often clamor more for what their parents are eating, so offer—but never push—foods from your plate that she's developmentally ready for.

Move up from mush.
Your little one's pickiness may simply be her way of telling you that she's had it with the baby stuff. Changing to chunky foods and finger foods that are soft enough for her to manage but intriguing enough in taste and texture to satisfy her maturing palate may turn her from fussy to epicureious. Variety may spice things up, too (
click here
).

Turn the tables.
Perhaps it's just a newly emerging streak of stubborn independence that's keeping her mouth zipped at mealtime. Hand her the responsibility of feeding, and she may open her mouth eagerly to a wide range of food experiences she would never consider taking from the spoon you offer. (For appropriate choices for the self-feeding baby,
click here
.)

Don't drown her appetite.
Many babies (and toddlers) eat very little because they're drinking too much juice, formula, or breast milk. At this point, your baby should have no more than 4 to 6 ounces of fruit juice (if any) and no more than 24 to 30 ounces of formula a day. If you're breastfeeding, you don't know exactly how much milk she's taking, but you can be pretty sure that nursing her more than 4 or 5 times a day will rain on her appetite for solids.

Attack snacks.
Snacks play a big role when you're filling a little tummy, but they can also easily sabotage a baby's appetite for meals and suck parents into a snack cycle that's hard to break. Case in point: What do parents do when baby snubs breakfast? Ply her with snacks all morning, of course, which means she isn't likely to have any appetite for lunch. And what happens after lunch is turned down? Baby's hungry again in the afternoon, snacking continues, and there's no room for dinner. So try to limit snacks to one in midmorning and one in midafternoon (a bedtime snack can be added, too, as part of the nightly bedtime ritual, but it's not a must). Serve snacks seated for safety's sake—as well as to nix nonstop nibbling.

Leave pressure off the menu.
Do you tend to pull out all the pushing, prodding, pleading, and coaxing stops when your baby fusses at mealtime? Time to shut down the “choo-choo train” service and let your baby choose when to open that tunnel wide and when to clamp it shut. For your little one to grow up with healthy feelings about food, she needs to eat because she's hungry (not because you want her to) and stop because she's full. In other words, let her appetite call the shots—even when it's calling it quits after just a few bites.

“Every time the spoon comes near my baby, he grabs for it. If his bowl is near enough, he dips his fingers in and makes a mess trying to feed himself. He's getting nothing to eat, and I'm getting frustrated.”

Your little one is dipping his sticky fingers into the bowl of independence—and, unfortunately for your kitchen floor, the bowl of mashed squash, too. Let him. It's time to spoon up what he's hungry for: a chance to feed himself … or at least attempt to feed himself.

Start by spooning up another spoon, one to call his own. True, he probably won't be able to do much more with his spoon than wave it around, and if he does manage to actually fill it up with food, he's likely to haul it up to his face upside down (or to come in for a landing closer to his nose than his mouth). But that's not the point at this point in his development—being involved in his own mealtimes is, no matter how messy a proposition it becomes.

Hopefully, wielding his own spoon will make him less grabby about yours—and busily occupied enough with his own challenging project (fill spoon, bring to the vicinity of the open mouth) that he may make your project of feeding him less challenging.

Still missing the mark? Try offering him finger foods (or a mesh feeder he can safely munch soft fruits and veggies from) to self-feed while you spoon-feed him, too. Between a spoon to wave, a few finger foods to nibble on, a feeder to suck on, and a spouted cup to take swigs from, your little food freedom fighter should be a lot more amenable to being fed. If not, let him have it his way—let him self-feed full-time. Mealtimes will take longer and be messier, but just think of those splats and splatters as a learning experience (as in, you learn to spread a splat mat on the floor under baby's high chair before every meal). Remember, too, that for your baby, eating isn't just a matter of taste and nutrition, but of feeling food, smelling food, squishing food, and smearing food.

That said, when self-feeding dissolves into all play and no eating (some play is part of the feeding game), pick up the spoon and take over the meal. If your baby balks, it's time to wipe the carrots off his chin and the avocado from between his fingers and end the meal.

“When I changed my baby's diaper today, I was really puzzled. Her BM seemed to be filled with grains of sand. But she never plays in a sandbox.”

Just when you're getting bored with changing diapers, another surprise turns up in one. Sometimes it's easy to figure out what went into baby to produce the change in her poop. Halloween orange color? Probably the carrots. Frightening red? Maybe beets or beet juice. Black specks or strands? Bananas. Small, dark foreign objects? Usually mashed blueberries or chopped raisins. Light green pellets? Perhaps peas. Yellow ones? Corn. Seeds? Very likely tomatoes, cucumbers, or melon from which the seeds were not completely removed.

Because babies don't chew (they barely gum food before they swallow) and their digestive tracts are relatively short and not fully mature, what goes in often comes out largely unchanged in color and texture. Sandy stools, such as those in your baby's diaper, are fairly common, not because babies snack from the sandbox (though they will, given a chance) but because certain foods—particularly Cheerios and similar oat cereals, and pears—often appear sandy once they've passed through the digestive tract.

So before you panic at the sight of what's filling your baby's diaper, think about what's been filling her tummy. If you're still puzzled, take a picture to show (or email or text) the doctor.

“Our daughter was born without hair and still barely has more than a light coating of peach fuzz. When will she get some hair?”

Hair today? Not always for babies this age—particularly those who are fair and destined (one day!) to have light locks. Hair tomorrow? Well … maybe day after tomorrow. Some cuties stay cue-ball bare throughout the first year and often well into the second. Happily, hairlessness (like toothlessness) isn't permanent, and doesn't predict a sparse hair supply later on in life. While you're waiting for your sprout to sprout some hair—at least enough to hold a barrette or two—look at the upside of slow-to-grow hair: easier shampoos, no tears over tangles.