Thursday, June 05, 2008

Ignoring Advice from the Pro

Everyone has advice. I think that is why I blog, I love to hear what other people think, and hope that once in a while I have something valuable to add.

There is only one person that I have typically used as the base line for decisions regarding Abby: her pediatrician. He has a wealth of experience over his years. He was the pediatrician for our best friend Charlene, however many years ago that was. (Let's just say I'm hitting a multiple of ten this year, and she's about six months older than I am....)

He has put our minds at ease when there has been a cough or an unexplained fever. The butt rash? Yep, he solved that in a couple of days of some magic cream.

But when the we agreed with Abby's teachers about her feeding patterns, we threw the doctor's advice to the wind!

We were given a very detailed plan for when to introduce foods, including specific fruits allowed and others that were not. This is a very useful guide we decided, but could not follow it closely at all. Actually, the rash refered to above was probably the cause of starting sweet potatoes before her little system was ready. Lesson learned.

When we had our parent-teacher conference earlier this year we were told just how much Abby was reaching for food, and probably ready to jump onto the finger-foods train. We began small, of course, but this was WAY ahead of the schedule provided by our doctor.

We looked the other day to check on the milk status (I'm hesitant about four things: milk, nuts, strawberries and pork) and noticed that at 11 and a half months we should begin to introduce solid foods like finger foods. Wow. At about 11 months Abby was pretty much done with puree's and moved onto table food completely. Now we are basically cutting food from our plates and givign it to her from there.

I hate to say our baby is advanced, because I believe that all babies get to certain things at certain times. We have several friends with older babies that will not touch a piece of food if it's not from a jar (purees), but Abby sure has moved on from that.

And it's saved us time, money and energy.

1 comment:

Amy said...

With MG I had a spreadsheet that I kept to with excruciating rigidity.

With Claire, we kind if winged it (wung it?). No spreadsheet. No waiting a week between new foods. She's had everything - including milk, strawberries, nuts, peanut butter, pork, chocolate, and all the other "trouble" foods, and she's fine. We don't have a history of allergies, though, and she's a little older than Abby.

Claire never did eat purees. She spit them out like Regan from the Exorcist. We went straight to finger food. No worries.

At times like these I remember that humanity survived for millenniums before we had all these experts bossing us around. :)

Amy @ http://prettybabies.blogspot.com