In Which I feed baby-part 2

So I posted last about feeding baby dinners. I thought I'd post a little more today about the rest of his meals and my general approach to feeding him and his eating.

My approach to dealing with baby's eating is I don't want there to be any power struggle there that I am creating.  Not to say there won't ever be any but I'm going to try to create a space where he feels in control over what he eats. I mean I think I'm succeeding, he felt very in control when he found that bug the other day and ate it and if I'd found him trying to eat it ahead of time I'd just have engaged him in a power struggle and tried to stop him while as it was I just got to dig the half masticated bug parts out of his mouth! See, it's important to not create needless power struggles with babies :P.  Seriously though I think kids will, in general, eat when they're hungry and my job is to provide healthful choices for him to choose from when he feels the need to eat. My goal is to help him learn to listen to his bodies signals and develop healthy eating habits from the first.   He's not going to like everything, heck, I don't like everything.  I will have him, when he's older, take a "no thank you" bite.  Both because we should in general give new foods a fair shot but we also have to be able to reject them politely if we don't care for them.  So I will use it to teach him how to taste something he doesn't like without  making faces or saying "yuck". But after that bite he won't be forced to eat any specific amount of the food and if he gets hungry later there will be simple healthful snacks (veggies and fruits) around for him to have then.   I also am not going to fight with him over how much he eats.  He won't get to go fill up on junky food after rejecting healthful food but I want him to learn to listen to his own body, not mama saying "you need to eat this much of this".    I want him to listen to mama when it's important but I don't want to tell him to listen to me instead of his own bodies hunger/satiation signals.



His meals now tend to be fruit (jarred baby food fruit) and yogurt (plain regular dannon right now) and baby cereal all mixed up for breakfast. I give him this with cheerios to pick up for pincher grip practice. Sometimes I scramble him an egg and he can pick those pieces up.  Lunch is some sort of veggies(sometimes home pureed, sometimes jarred) with crackers ( a few ritz style crackers, graham crackers or oyster crackers).  And dinner tends to be a baby-safe version of our meal or if that's not possible (you try to babyfood frozen pizza, go on, I dare you! It also has to not give the baby blowout diapers in the end, so yeah, not possible) then I make him a separate dinner for him. Sometimes I boil pasta and put it through the mill and mix it with jarred baby veggies. Sometimes I cook some frozen veggies and put them in the food processor.