Can I give rice cereal mixed with carrots before carrots alone?

[ljackson]

DD is 5.5 months and will eat rice quite happily and I am now trying to introduce some veg. She seems not to like the taste of carrots, so I thought that it might go down better if I mixed some carrot with some rice. Things I have read suggest that you should not offer a combination before testing tolerance to each ingredient separately, but I can't get her to take the carrot and she just spits it out. My logic was that she would be more likely to accept a mixture and that if she doesn't tolerate the mixture it must be because of the carrot because I know that she is fine with rice. I was wondering why nobody seems to suggest this (or maybe they do and I missed it).

TIA

[mudder17]

If you've already given her rice cereal and she's tolerated it fine, then you can mix it with a new food and test it out that way. Logically, it makes sense to me that if she tolerated the rice fine, but she didn't tolerate the rice and carrots then she probably has a problem with carrots. I'm not an expert though, and I suppose the two could act differently together than separately, but I think you'll be fine.

FWIW, Mika tried oatmeal cereal and while she liked it, it did not agree with her. So I immediately stopped it and tried steamed pears with her. She wasn't so sure about it, but eventually ate it all. She did fine with it, so I offered her pears for the next several days and then eventually added rice cereal to it to thicken it up. I had never tried her with rice cereal before, but I figured it would be fine and it was. I will most likely just use the cereal as a thickener from now on.


Eileen

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[jgriffin]

I agree with Eileen about it being fine to offer a combo of rice and carrots, since you've already offered rice and she's fine with it. Some of the jarred baby foods are already combos (like 2 different fruits), and we did some of those with E even though he'd never had either one before. I really think the advice of trying single foods is so that if your kid does have a reaction you know exactly to what and you don't have to go back and test each ingredient separately.

We used rice and oatmeal as thickeners for baby food when E was older and wanted more texture in his food. It could be that your daughter is rejecting the thickness of the carrots and rice, in addition to the taste of carrots.

Jen