Table Foods

I’d try what they call “soft munchables” as she’s already doing puff and dissolve. Examples are very soft foods that she can pick up herself like cheese (if she does dairy), bread, peas, corn, cubed squash, sweet potatoes, pasta etc. I would start with things that are easy to mush up with the palate and don’t need lots of chewing. Also good is to start with things that she’s already eaten, just in a different form. So if she likes peas, then steam some soft ones and put them out. If she likes sweet potato do the same and cut them up into tiny soft cubes. If she likes pears do the same with a very ripe pear. That way she only had to overcome the form and not the new taste as well. Good luck.

Kaelyn didn’t have teeth at that stage either and she did fine with finger foods. I can’t remember exactly what we did, but I believe that we offered her finger foods, but also gave her a fork. She really liked having control over her own foods and always wanted to feed herself. This got really messy with purees, but I do think that it helped her to add more foods to her list. She was big on being independent. She also went through a stage where she only wanted foods that came off of our plate. I think that she thought that she was getting something special since it was ours. For a while, we would make her food up, put it on one of our plates and then pretend to eat in front of her. She would come up and try to share with us.

With my girls and now with Myles I pretty much concentrated on purees at this age, knowing they are getting good nutrition from them and also are learning to like the taste of veggies and fruits. I usually would feed them their baby food about an hour before we all had dinner and then at dinner time I’d give them little pieces of finger foods to try. My girls never ate lumpy foods, either. It was either purees or finger foods. Over many, many months they gradually began to eat more finger foods and less baby foods, but I continued giving them baby food until they were about 18 months (longer for Ellie because she was slower to accept new foods) because I felt that was the best source of fruits and veggies for them until they were competent enough and willing enough to self feed. Like many babies they were resistant to being fork fed any table foods, wanting to be independent, and finger foods were a great source of fun play and exploration for them, so not much of it ended up in the mouth initially. My girls also would not eat soft cooked veggies or fruits until they were old enough to use a fork and eat them….another reason I stuck with purees for so long.

With no teeth, I’d really stick to soft foods that can be mashed by the gums. Choking is a big concern at this age, even with teeth.

I guess my approach may seem weird to some, feeding purees for so long. But my girls are fabulous eaters today. They eat lots of fruits, berries, and vegetables and they don’t have a lot of the common pitfalls that are seen in many toddler/pre-schooler diets today.

I hope that helps, but if you think my approach is strange, I fully understand!

for sauce, maybe just cook in a lot of sauce?

or pour sauce over pieces?

or let her dip into the sauce?

I avoided tomato sauce for a long time w/ jonah- I was too scared– I used babyfood pureed carrots- sweet and tomato-sauce-like

I totally forgot about using purees as sauce – we used to do that with Owen all the time. He LOVED sweet potato over the pasta pieces with peas – so gross, but he loved it. Maybe that could help her with eating the pasta if it’s a little more familiar? I never tried that with meat – I was daring and used tomato sauce – but I bet that would work!