How to Make Baby Finger Foods

When your baby is ready to try feeding herself, it's time to introduce soft morsels of food. By the time your child is 9 months old, she may express an interest in putting her food in her mouth with her fingers. At that point you can offer many baby-friendly foods to her.

Instructions

Difficulty: Easy

1. Serve up fruits for a nutritious treat that'll she'll want to keep eating. Start by offering canned peaches, packed in water, and dice them into small bits. Add bite-sized pieces of bananas and pears for her first foods. As she masters those fruits, you may introduce diced melon. Choose the unsweetened variety of canned fruits from your grocer.
2. Offer soft vegetables to keep your baby healthy and happy. Since vegetables in their raw state are too hard for your baby to chew, make sure you cook them thoroughly before dicing and serving. Try baking a sweet potato, allowing it cool and then dicing for a nutritious treat you'll be happy to see your baby eat.
3. Grind up graham crackers in your blender until they are the consistency of fine powder. After chopping up soft cooked vegetables, roll them in the graham powder to reduce the slippery factor. Alternately, you can grind bits of unsweetened breakfast cereal or wheat germ to coat the sides of slick finger foods so your baby can hold them.
4. Provide salt-free canned peas, bits of cooked potatoes and other vegetables. Your baby hasn't developed a taste for salt, so why give it to her. She will appreciate the flavor of reduced-sodium canned foods and you'll feel better about letting her eat them.
5. Bypass candy and other sweets. It's fun to provide sweet treats to your baby but pediatricians recommend leaving added sugar out of a baby's diet until they are older. Tiny baby teeth are susceptible to cavities just as adult teeth are.
6. Monitor your baby when allowing her to eat finger foods. If she puts too much food into her mouth before swallowing, she may choke. Help her pick up a few small pieces at a time.