feeding schedule question

TM&AB

Charlie is 5 months now! WOW that went fast. He is HUGE 17lbs 6oz and 28 inches long. We have been doing rice cereal for his 2nd and last feeding of the day for three weeks and the ped recommended we go ahead and start some veggies/fruits. I plan to make my own so we are hoping to start next week.  And after that long ramble here are the questions.

What type of feeding schedule is/was your DC on around 5-6 months? Did you do bottles/nurse seperate from solid foods or at the same time? If you did not give a bottle/nurse did you offer water with food? How did you make sure your child was eating enough?

He usually goes to bed at 9 or 9:30 pm and sleeps until 7 or 8 am. I know I am very lucky but that only leaves a certain amount of hours to make sure he eats everything he needs.

hav2run

Wow, that really did go fast!  When DD started solids, we did one feed a day in the evening.  We worked through the veggies before we gave her any fruit.  I think giving fruit first builds a taste for sweets, and I didn't want to go there.  We typically fed her 1 or 2 cubes of a veggie around 6 pm, which was 3 hours after her last bottle, and an hour prior to the next bottle.  It worked well.  She was hungry enough to want the solids, but not upset  because it was bottle time.  Have fun with it!

Moesten

When introducing solids, we went with just one feeding a day while introducing the new food in the evening. ?After a few days when you know he can tolerate that food well (i.e. no allergies) you can move that food to the evening and introduce a new solid earlier in the day. ?We were instructed by our pedi to introduce the new food earlier in the day so that if there was a reaction, God forbid, then you will catch it better than he reacts in the middle of the night. So as soon as we moved onto solids, she was having them at least twice a day. Like PP, we fed her solids roughly an hour after nursing and continued to nurse her on a 3 to 4 hour schedule. ?His nutrition should still be primarily from breast milk or formula; the foods are just for fun/practice.

FYI: in reference to the veggies vs. fruits first, our pedi says you can introduce either first. Babies naturally have a sweet tooth - it's one of the few taste distinctions with which humans are born. Breast milk is sweet and apparently, from what I have read and what our pedi says, lots of breast fed babies reject veggies first because they are accustomed to sweeter foods. ?Our pedi suggested that if we started with veggies, we should start with sweeter ones such as sweet potatoes. ?We started with bananas. ?She is fully into stage two foods now three times a day and loves everything. Maybe ask your pedi what they recommend? ?