Try to encourage your children to experience different foods. With a wide variety of foods to choose from you are also helping to have the learn to try new things.

There are so many things that you can get a toddler to eat that a young child will not (if they have never tried them before) such as beats, or even olives.

I think it is wonderful to try to give new foods to your children, don’t always expect that it will stay that way. I think every child goes through the faze of chicken fingers, and peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. Give them what they like, just try to through in some new things too!

This is really important, especially with bottle fed babies.  If you are just propping your baby up with the bottle in their mouth this will increase the possibility of them choking.

Also if you are putting your baby to bed with a bottle, this could increase the chances of ear infections later on in their life.

The best reason that I can think of to hold your baby while have their bottle, is the bonding time that you get.  As your baby looks into your eyes, you know that they are thanking you just by the way the look at you.  They are priceless times that you can’t get back, so why not hold them a little bit longer!

It can be hard for the father to feel like they are getting the bonding time with your new baby that you are getting. He may even feel a little left out. I’m going to give you some tips to help with this.

The first and most obvious one is to pump when you have extra milk. This way you can bottle it and this will allow the daddy to do some of the feedings too!

Another way is to let your husband do the burping. This way the feeding is more of a team effort. You do the feeding and he does the burping. He will be able to rub your baby’s back for about 5 minutes or so to try and get a burp, but it will also be a great bonding time for them. This will also allow you to get some rest.

The last one is when you start your baby on solids, involve dad. It could just be that you are so used to doing all of the feedings that you don’t think about having that extra help.

Some dads really do want to be involved, but just don’t know how to going about asking. They may feel like you are the only one that can do the feedings since you supply the milk, so it may be up to you to get that ball rolling, and in the end everyone will be happier!

This is an interesting question. I don’t think it could be the difference in a life threating diseases, but it is better for you baby.

The reason that I say this is because when you have organic products, there aren’t all of those chemicals that are going into them. When you have organic products they are generally grown with none of those pesticides or other toxins that tend to stay on the product, weather it be food or clothing.

Buying organic is a great way to keep the toxins away from your family, but also help protect our environment. What a great deal!

Just as it is unhealthy for you to smoke while you are pregnant it is also unhealthy to smoke while breastfeeding.  It isn’t something that we hear about all of the time, but some of the harms of this would be:

• increased chest problems
• increased allergies
• increased asthma
• increased respiratory disease
• increased risk that they are going to hook their child
• the child will be predetermined to be addicted to cigarettes and smoking

Another factor that needs to be considered are things like the patch, these things can actually put just as much nicotine into your baby’s system.

If you have quit smoking while you were pregnant, try to not to go back to it.  I know this is easier said than done, but why not give it a try?

If you feel like you just can’t quit, then when you smoke do it away try to stay outside while smoking, try to smoke as few cigarettes as possible, and wait until after you feed your baby to smoke.

This is a pretty common concern, because of seafood allergies and the mercury that is in seafood.

If there are no seafood allergies in the family you are probably safe to let your child eat some seafood at one-year of age.  If there are some allergies in the family your should probably wait until your child is 3-years-old.

Try not to discourage seafood altogether because it is very good for you, with a lot of nutrition. Eating seafood low in mercury twice a week is a good way to get the nutrition without worrying.

Shrimp, canned light tuna, salmon, pollock, and catfish are among 5 of  the more commonly eaten and contain less mercury.

This really depends on the child.  After looking up some information I found that most babies are beginning to burp on their own anywhere from 4 to 9 months, with the majority being at around 6 months.

If you think that your baby is starting to burp on their own simply just stop trying.  If you notice that he/she starts spitting up more, or getting more gassy than normal, you may want to go back to burping your baby.

It may be that your baby is burping on their own, but if you don’t think he/she is but he/she is doing fine without you burping her/him, it may be that they are just swallowing less air while eating.

The best way to feed your baby is to use a baby food grinder, this way you know what they are getting.  You can steam veggies and put them in the grinder, along with meat and fruits.  It is a lot cheaper as well.

I don’t think any one brand is better than the other as far as jar food goes.  I just think it is good to  give your baby a variety of foods.  I gave Alex veggies before fruit so that he would like them more.  The doctor warned me that once he had the sweet tasting fruit that would be all he wanted.

I gave Alex Veggies for about two weeks before giving him any fruit, and the doctor was right.  He ending up liking both of them!

A schedule is not only helpful for you to know when your baby eats and takes their nap.  It is also good for your baby because there is less change of belly aces to too much gas if they don’t go from eating 5 times a day one day to 9 times the next.  If you didn’t start a schedule when you came home from the hospital then I highly recommend starting one now.  If you feel like it is too much to wait every four hours to feed your baby, do every three.  That is what I had Alex on.  He ate every three hours which turned out to be at 7, 10, 1, 4, and 7.   It helped greatly when we were developing a nap time and a bed time and getting him to sleep through the night.  It is also a good guide to changing diapers.  If you haven’t changed a diaper in a while, just change it at least every time your baby eats.