Baby and toddler snacking
We’re back! We both spent the last month in the northeast getting in some much needed quality time with family and friends (and each other!). It was bucket filling, to say the least, but we missed you guys and are excited to be back for today’s post on baby and toddler snacking.
We’ve had some snack related questions from clients and friends about when to start introducing them, how often to offer them, portions, and what to serve in general. Whether you’re just starting to introduce snacks to your baby, or in a rut with the same go-tos, here are some of our favorite tips to help you feel good about your little one’s snacking.
Baby and toddler snacking overview
From the get go we want to stress our belief that snacks do not need to be (and really should not be) anything novel or special. They should really look a lot like the foods that you serve to your baby at meals. A snack could be as easy as some cut up strawberries, or might be some leftover pasta and meatballs from an earlier meal.
Similar to adults, snacks for littles should serve as an opportunity to provide energy and nourishment and to bridge the gap between two meals (for the most part - there’s a time and place for snacks as distraction). When first introducing snacks, this often looks like 1 snack in between breakfast and lunch, and another in between lunch and dinner, however, there are reasons to have more or fewer snacks depending on your baby’s needs and various external factors (think: distraction during travel or in particularly fussy moments, totally okay; some babies are particularly distracted during developmental leaps and require smaller, more frequent snacks throughout the day to meet their daily needs).
When thinking about snacks for babies and toddlers, we like to try to include at least 2 different foods (an opportunity to offer a wider variety of flavors and nutrients), but sometimes that doesn’t happen and that is totally fine too!
Remember, our job as parents or caregivers is to decide what and when we serve our children, and then it is our childrens’ job to decide if and how much they will eat (this is harder in practice, of course, but oh so important to remember).
When to introduce snacks
We say this a lot, but really, every single baby is different. One approach that worked well for our babies was introducing regular snacks around 10.5 months, to coincide with when we started the weaning process and dropped the midday bottles (with snacks replacing some of the calories and nutrients lost from those bottles). This is one of many options when it comes to weaning and introducing snacks, so if you need more guidance or support to find the right approach for you, please feel free to reach out.
Snack portions
When we first introduced snacks to our boys, we were a bit confused about what portions should look like and frankly, some days we felt like we offered too much and others we offered too little. The takeaway goes back to the above point - our kiddos are incredibly intuitive eaters, and will decide how hungry they are and what (if anything) they will eat.
There’s no hard and fast rule when it comes to snack portion size, and we encourage you to play around with portions and let your baby guide you in determining what’s right. Start smaller than a meal (somewhere between 1/4 to 1/2 of what’s typical) and see how your baby does - if he/she still seems hungry, offer more (or if you don’t have any more to offer, grab something else that’s easy).
Snack ideas
Here are some of our favorite snacks for our babies (note: how you serve these to your baby will depend on age/eating ability - we recommend referencing Solid Starts for helpful visuals).
Lentil pasta (we love Tolerant Foods) mixed with ricotta and lemon juice (or pesto)
Yogurt with berries and nut butter
White beans (plain or tossed with pesto) solo, or paired with with raspberries
Tofu (pan-fry extra-firm tofu in avocado oil until lightly browned) tossed with pesto
Tofu with with dipping sauce of choice:
Apple sauce
Peanut butter tahini sauce (1 tablespoon each tahini, peanut butter and freshly squeezed orange juice, thinned with water to reach desired consistency)
Apple sauce with nut butter
Fruit (solo, or paired with nut butter or avocado)
Avocado with cherry tomatoes
Hard boiled egg salad (chopped hard boiled eggs mixed with avocado)
Turkey or chicken meatballs (we love this recipe and alternate using turkey and chicken)
Black beans with mango or papaya
Pancakes with nut butter
Smoothie (we like using a combo of milk (for baby over 1), yogurt or another source of protein, spinach, nut butter, and fruit)
Cheese (we love organic swiss, cheddar, havarti and mozzarella) solo, or with fruit or cherry tomatoes
Steamed carrots (or cauliflower or green beans) with hummus
Avocado toast
Cheese quesadilla
Cerebelly bars (love these so much for on the go)
Pouches - amazing for when you need a quick option, or if you are on the go
Cerebelly pouches
Serenity Kids pouches
Organic applesauce pouches (Whole Foods brand makes a great one)
A few more things
Where we share all the things we’re loving, reading, listening to, cooking, discussing and purchasing as of late.
We’re both on the heels of big trips with our families. It’s been an amazing summer spending much needed time with family and friends back in the northeast, but cross-country flights and multiple road trips with our highly mobile 15- and 16-month olds…yikes yikes yikes…but snacks to the rescue. We love these snack containers from GoBe and LunchBots - an absolute essential for flights, road trips and long days out of the house!
The GoBe and Lunchbots snack boxes would be nothing without our favorite freezer lunch box to keep them cold. This product is absolute genius - it has freezer packs built into the sides of the bag (so you just store the bag in the freezer to make it cold), making traveling with food on the go a breeze.
We’re longtime stasher bag fans - we have multiple sizes and and continue to find new ways to put them to use. We love them for any and all food storage at home and for snacks on the go. Lately, we’ve been using them to store our boys’ pouches and Cerebelly bars in our diaper bags so that we can easily find them amidst the general chaos in our bags.
If you read our intro to solids post, you know how much we love our EZPZ plates and bowls. The bowl, in particular, is especially good for snacks and we often use it as a starting point for snack portion size (knowing that your baby may need more or less).
Let’s be real: puffs are the ultimate travel hack. Remember how we said there’s a time and place for snacks as a distraction? Time/place = travel of any kind. In general, we do our best to stick to regularly scheduled meals and snacks, but our summer travel was *humbling* to say the least and as routine went out the window, we found ourselves relying on puffs often. We love these puffs from Serenity Kids - high quality ingredients, less messy than other brands, and excellent travel-friendly packaging.
Two great tote bags we used and loved for our flights and road trips: Lands End XL tote and LL Bean Large Hunter Tote. Roomy, flexible, hold-everything bags that contain any and all things we could possibly need for our boys in transit: ipads, toys, snacks, etc.
Wipes! We are big water wipes gals and relied heavily on the XL bathing water wipes during our trips. The standard wipes are always great for clean up, but we love the XL version because they’re textured (extra helpful for food removal) and the larger surface area was nice for a full body wipe down on the go. We also loved these alcohol free hand sanitizer wipes and these toy, table and high chair wipes. All three now have permanent homes in our diaper bags.