How to Prepare Babies First Foods

Hi Everyone, today’s post is about how I have been preparing Baby Jasper’s first foods. I started weaning Jasper shortly after he turned 4 months old because he had started to show signs he was ready for solid food. Prior to this he had been sleeping quite well in the night but from 4 months old he started sleeping pretty terribly and waking up in the night for extra milk. He would also watch us eat all the time and try to take the food from us and he was eating his hands a lot (but he still does that so it may not have been a sign of needing weaning!). Jasper started off by eating baby rice and now that he is 6 months old he also eats vegetables, fruits and potatoes. So this is a short guide of the ‘equipment’ I have been using and how I have been preparing his food.

Equipment

• Breast Milk Collection Shells
• Nuby Steam Steriliser
• Steamer
• NUTRiBULLET
• Ice Cube Trays
• Bowls, Spoons and Cup

So the first thing I did when I started on Jasper’s weaning journey was to go to the supermarket and look at some first foods. I decided a baby rice would probably be good for him to try first. This is to be mixed with baby’s usual milk but as Jasper is breast fed I didn’t have any of his milk to mix so I started looking at ways to collect some breast milk. I stumbled across the breast milk collection shells listed above and I think these are really great for collecting the milk. You just pop one in to your top on the side you are not feeding from and it collects all of the excess milk that you would have just leaked out anyway. I find that throughout the day I can collect enough for Jasper’s rice or cereal the next day. I then just store this in the fridge in a sterilised bottle. Breast milk can be stored in the fridge for up to five days or in the freezer for up to six months.

The next thing I looked in to when starting to wean was sterilising. The NHS website states that all baby’s feeding equipment should be sterilised until they are 12 months old. As Baby Jasper was only 4 months old when I started to wean him on to solid food, I have been sterilising his bowls, cups and spoons, ice cube trays and breast milk collection shells. I found the sterilising the hardest part of preparing Jasper’s food as it is a lot of work!

Once I had given Jasper baby rice for a couple of days he was ready to start on some pureed and mushy vegetables. I decided to cook Jasper’s vegetables by steaming them using the steamer listed above. I have never really steamed vegetables before but I find this steamer really easy to use and it changes size to fit in to different size pans. I simply peeled and chopped the vegetables and placed them in to the steamer. I then added about a centimetre of boiling water in to a pan, placed the steamer in the pan, put the lid on the pan and left it on the hob until the vegetables were soft enough.

I steamed some of the vegetables in cubes to be made in to a puree and some as sticks which could be used as finger foods. I then placed the cubes in my NUTRiBULLET with some breast milk and pureed them which worked quite well. I also steamed up some fruits such as pears and apples as sticks so they were a bit softer for Jasper to have as finger foods. Also to prepare potatoes for Jasper to have as mash, I just cooked them in the microwave then peeled off the skin and mashed them.

Once the food is cooked, I freeze the purees and mashed food as ice cubes and the finger foods in a pot so that  have loads of food to defrost and feed Jasper as and when he needs it.

I hope this has helped some of you with starting your weaning journeys and I would love to hear your tips for preparing baby food.

Thanks for reading, Jen x