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Once your baby is about twice his birth weight, you should start introducing cereal into his diet. Start with whole, single grain baby cereal. Do not put the cereal into his bottle. This can cause confusion and allow him to take in too many calories too quickly, which can lead to overeating habits, obesity, or even diabetes. Because drinking from a bottle is very different from swallowing solids, most of the cereal will wind up outside the baby’s mouth. To ensure that there is no allergy, wait a week before introducing a second grain, and a week between every additional grain.

After you have introduced your child to wheat, rice and oatmeal, you can begin introducing fruits and vegetables. Yellow and orange varieties are the most easily digested and are a great place to start. Potatoes, carrots, yams, sweet potatoes, nectarines, peaches, pears, and apples will provide a great base for your baby’s diet. Unlike cereal, you can introduce a new vegetable or fruit every two days. Quickly, you will learn which flavors baby likes best.

Once fruits and vegetables are introduced and your child is maintaining a healthy weight gain, you can start serving juice and water to him. By six months, most doctors are encouraging parents to feed their babies dairy products and meats.

All of these types of food should be finely mashed before feeding them to your baby. Your baby most likely does not have any teeth yet, and if he does, he most likely does not know how to use them. A great place to start looking for solid foods is jarred baby food. Ambitious parents can also make their own baby food in the blender or food processor. Just make sure to blend it enough so that baby isn't swallowing whole chunks of food that can hurt his throat and be harder to digest.

By nine months of age your baby should be able to eat just about everything you eat; however, it is still too soon for cow's milk, corn and any kind of citrus fruit or juice.

Once your child has reached a year old, milk, corn, and citrus fruits and juice can be consumed.

If you must feed your baby food that can be choked on such as grapes, uncooked carrots, sliced apple, chips, baby biscuits, or hot dogs, make sure that the food is cut up small enough to fit down his esophagus.