What Should My 7 Month Old Be Eating??

Hi S., I have a 8 month old and I was totally confused on what to feed her also at 7 months. I started out giving her stage 2 foods and (real)green beans, carrots, applesauce. Also my baby loves spaghetti and bread. For snacks have you tried puffs or cherrios?

I have a 7 month old also and she's been on stage 2 for a while. We started out on stage one at about 4 1/2 months cuz bottles and cereal just didn't satisfy her. When she started getting to the point that one jar of food didn't satisfy her on stage one we went to stage 2. We are getting ready to start stage 3 since she has a couple of teeth. So right now my daughter has a nice little schedule. She gets up at 7 and has a bottle at 7:30, cereal at 9, bottle at 10:30, half jar of veggies and half jar of fruit at 12, bottle at 1:30, bottle at 4:30, half jar of veggies and half jar of fruit at 6, and bottle at 7:30 then in bed by 8:30. So she has 5 bottles but they are only 5 ounces. It kinda just varies on the kid. The only time Arianna every got 2 cereals a day was before she started on baby food. I'd say go ahead and start on stage 2. And since the jars are bigger than stage one don't give them all the jar. We give half fruit and half veggies cuz it tends to make Arianna eat better. Kids love sweet stuff so she gets all the veggies before the fruits. Add meat at any time too. Just give one at a time and see how they respond to it before trying another one. If you need anything else message me!

Hello,
My son is just 8 months and has been on stage 2 the whole time almost (since about five/six months) we did use a few stage one, but not always...my ped said the difference is that stage 2 isn't as smooth as stage one....I would buy some, what I do is I feed him as much as he eats and stick what is left in the fridge for later...so that I am not wasting money....my son eats on serving of cereal, two veggie, and two fruit, and three 8 oz bottles a day....I have never heard of the two cereal thing....I hope this helps you out some....

Honey, you sound so much like me when I had my first child. You are going to be ok and you are a great mom. I now have 2 children and the second child is much easier because i've been there and done it. As far as the food, just do what your doctor says about the 2 fruit and 2 veggies and 2 cereals a day. treat your child like yourself. Breakfast: cereal mixed with one scoop of formula and add fruit for flavor. I never even added water. Lunch: 1 jar of veggies, one fruit, bottle. Supper: 1 veggie, cereal mixed with one scoop of formula and bottle.
Remember: formula and cereal is their main source of nutrition. The food is just getting their mouths used to different tastes and textures, so if they don't eat everything dont' worry about it. Remember: NO WORRIES Good Luck!!!

if he is eating all the stage 1 foods with problems or allergies, the you can start intrducing the next step. you can even try meat....but most kids don't like the meat. i can't really blame them, they look and smell like dog food. after i got my daughter used to the fruits and vegies, i started giving her the meat/vegie combos. she liked them much better. my pediatriciam more or less told me to give her whatever she would eat, just stick with the same thing for several days to make sure there were no allergic reactions

Hi this is J. DeBaun. I understand what your going through. Trying to keep your baby healthy and everything. When my son was that old they told me not to feed him meats out of the jar. If i was going to feed him any meats it would be the ones that I cook. She said that it can cause them to have food allergies. That is what i was told. I hope that this may help.

J. DeBaun

The truth is, you can start with meats if they will eat them, but many times it's a texture thing they have to get used to. There is no difference between stage one and stage two except the size of the jar/serving and they blend the foods some. But everything is just as pureed at stage two as they are at stage one! You will save some money buying the bigger jars until he's eating more.
Giving him a good variance of foods is important to teach him to like lots of different foods, however, a baby's main nutrition come from the bottle or breast until around the age of one, so you don't need to worry about that side of it as long as you haven't changed how much you formula/breast feed.
Some good websites for info are:
http://www.superbabyfood.com/chap7mon.htm
http://www.kidshealth.org/parent/growth/growth/grow47m.html
http://www.thebabycorner.com/page/39/
At this point, it's still better to feed by bottle/breast first to make sure he gets what he needs there and then offer solids since they offer limited nutrition.
Good Luck:)

My son is 7 months old, and has been on stage 2 foods for about 3 weeks. As soon as we'd let him try all the stage 1 foods and saw that he had no allergies, we moved on to stage 2, and so far he's loved everything. He's a sweet potato maniac, lol, so his favorites are sweet potatoes and turkey, sweet potatoes and corn, and mixed veggies. And he loves the Hawaiian Delight and Vanilla Custard desserts. He's not picky though, so he'll eat pretty much any of them, except squash. He gets about 6 5oz bottles a day, and he eats 3/4 of a jar of stage 2 food for lunch and dinner (we give him fruits for lunch and veggies/meats for dinner), and he has baby oatmeal with bananas (the kind that has dha an ara) for breakfast. Our pediatrician advised us on feeding him like this because it will make the transition into him eating meals with us 3 times a day much, much easier! We also give him some finger foods to snack on..Puffs, small pieces of bananas that he can smush with his tongue pretty well, since he only has one tooth, and the Gerber Graduated Lil' Crunchies (he loves the veggie dip ones).

Hi S.,
If you go to the gerber.com website, they have a "brief" suggestion area of when to transition them. I suppose because of their ability to swallow and digest, I noticed they go more by what the baby is able to do at each phase, like phase 1 once they can sit unassited, stage 2 once they can crawl etc (don't quote me on what the requirements are, just examples) I do highly recommend you follow your ped's advice and I commend you for being cautious.

When my daughter was 8 1/2 months (in lat April and May) I took her to San Diego then Dallas to see family, almost 3wks. It was so hard to keep her on baby food, everyone was so excited to see her enjoy diff foods...
Make a longgg story short, she ended up with GERD, an accelerated form of acid reflux, she had began refusing ALL foods, including her bottle, her throat and esophagus were swollen and it hurt to eat, she woke up hourly at night crying cos of the heartburn.. I was heartbroken. She is fine now but it could lead to surgery if it gets bad.
Point being, I put her back on baby food, OFF dairy products (yogurt and cheese) fatty foods (she loves eating off my fettucini alfredo for instance) tomato based products (acid) and any citric foods.
Lesson learned :)
Take your time, there is NO rush... The #2 foods do introduce more foods so I am sure he'll love the flavors :) She never did like the meats from the gerber jars and has a hard time with the #3's that have chunks of food...
Amy

All kids are different so it's hard to compare. However, here's what mine were doing. At 7 months, my kids were eating 3 meals a day at the table with the rest of the family. About half of what they ate were the same foods, just cut into pea-size pieces so they could pick them up and feed themselves. I usually gave them something we didn't have, like a banana or avacado, that they could eat. If we had meat, I used the hand grinder and then spoon fed it to them. They had a sippy cup of water with meals. They nursed at snack-time (morning and afternoon) and at bedtime and at other times during the day when they got hungry.

My son hated the spoon by around 7 months and when he was 8 months old we stopped all spoon-fed items completely until he learned how to use it to feed himself around 13-15 months. My daughter wanted to stop all spoon-feeding around 9 months and learned to feed herself with a spoon around 15 months. The reason I had to cut everything into bite-size chunks was because neither kid had front teeth to take bites off.... the kids got their first tooth after their first birthday. Babies can gum pretty much anything.

My son was on stage 1 food for like a week. It was too runny for him to manuveur to the back of his mouth and he just got frustrated. More food came out than went in. So we went to stage 2 right away and he liked it much better. With my daughter, we skipped stage 1 completely and just started at stage 2 at 5-6 months. I stopped buying 'baby food' completely for both kids by the time they were 6-7 months old because it's not needed. Just fork-smash whatever the rest of the family is eating. They'll get a wider variety of tastes, textures and seasoning... which means much less chance of having a picky eater when they are toddlers or preschoolers (my kids will eat anything put in front of them... even 'wierd' new ethnic foods).

One more note concerning allergies. We have no allergies in our family. Our ped told us to not worry about waiting a few days between new foods. The reasoning makes sense. It can take eating something 5-15 times or more to develop an allergy so even if you wait a couple days before introducing a new food, you still need to play detective because you have no idea what the allergy is to. So you might as well just feed them what the rest of the family eats. My son was born in CA and everyone we knew got the same advice from their peds. I didn't know people did the 'give 1 food and then wait 3 days things' anymore until we moved back to the midwest! Everyone we knew on the west coast stopped doing that 5+ years ago!

i would go ahead and start feeding stage two because when i started feeding my little girl at 4 months baby food i thought the whole time i was giving her stage 1 and it was 2 i was so nervous and the dr said it was okay sometimes usually just a little thicker but she hasn't had any problem and i started to add meats about 6 months she loves it i wanted to know when i could start to give cherrios something for her to eat with her fingers. any suggestions good luck with your baby.