What to Write Down When Starting Solids (And What You Can Safely Skip)

2026-10-26

The first week of solids, most people write far too much. The second week, they write nothing. Both are the same problem: nobody told you which fields are worth the thirty seconds it takes to fill them in.

This isn't about what or when to feed your child — that's a conversation for your pediatrician, and this article has no opinion on it. This is purely about the record. What do you need to have written down so that, four months from now, you can answer a question you don't know you'll be asked yet?

The four fields that carry the whole diary

If you record nothing else, record these.

1. The food, by its actual name. Not "veg puree." Write carrot, boiled, smooth. Three months later, "veg puree" is unsearchable — you'll have twenty entries that all say the same thing and no way to tell them apart.
2. The date. Obvious, but worth stating: a food without a date proves nothing. If you're writing on paper, write the date on every single row, not just at the top of the page.
3. Whether it was new or repeated. A one-word marker — new, or nothing — is enough. This is the single field that makes a diary searchable later, because almost every question that comes up afterwards is some version of "when did we first try this?"
4. What you observed. Not your interpretation — what you actually saw. "Pushed it back out with her tongue twice, then ate it" is a record. "Didn't like it" is a guess you'll be stuck with.

Four fields. Twenty seconds. That's the version you'll still be keeping in six weeks.

The ingredient trap

The one place short notes fail is mixed foods. A jar, a family meal, a pouch, something a grandparent made — "pasta with sauce" is a record of nothing if you ever need to work backwards from a reaction.

What helps:

• For shop-bought items, write the brand and exact product name, and photograph the ingredient list once. You don't need to retype it — the photo is the record.
• For home-cooked meals, list the components rather than the dish: potato, butter, salmon, dill. Keep the dish name too if you like, but the components are what you'll search.
• Note the form, when it varies: raw, cooked, mashed, as a finger-sized piece. The same food in a different form is a genuinely different entry.

This is the part people skip and the part they regret skipping. Nobody has ever wished for a vaguer record.

What you can skip

Some fields look important and almost never get read again:

• Exact gram weights. Unless your pediatrician has specifically asked you to measure, "a few spoons" and "most of it" carry the same information for your purposes, and they take a tenth of the effort.
• Clock times, for every entry. Rough times matter when you're trying to line up a reaction with a meal. Exact minutes, logged religiously for weeks, mostly add friction.
• Mood, cuteness, long narration. Lovely to have, terrible to search. Keep those as photos or a separate memory journal rather than mixing them into the field you'll one day scan for a specific ingredient.
• Your conclusions. "I think it's the tomato" ages badly. Record the observation; let the conclusion be a separate, revisable thought.

Photos: one per new food, not twelve

A photo answers questions text can't — texture, portion, what the skin on the cheek actually looked like. But a camera roll with four hundred food pictures mixed into holiday photos isn't a record, it's a haystack.

The habit worth building: one photo attached to the entry itself, for new foods and for anything you want to look at again. Attached, not floating. A photo that lives inside the diary entry carries its own date and context forever; a photo in your gallery needs you to remember the week it was taken.

Make the format match the habit

You will be writing these notes one-handed, often with the other hand holding a spoon or a child. Whatever format you choose has to survive that.

Paper is instant but doesn't search. A notes app searches but drifts into chaos. A spreadsheet is tidy and miserable to fill in from a phone. A dedicated diary gives you the same fields every time, which is the real benefit — consistency isn't discipline, it's a form that only lets you do one thing.

Pudding is the version of that we built for ourselves: free, no account, and it works offline, so the data stays on the phone and the entry takes seconds. Whatever you use, pick it before week one rather than during week three, because migrating half-written records is its own small misery.

A sane starting template

Copy this into whatever you're using:

• Date
• Food (specific name + form)
• New? y/n
• Ingredients, if mixed
• Observed — what you saw, in your own words
• Photo — optional, attached to the entry

That's it. If a field doesn't get filled in for two weeks running, delete it. A short diary you actually keep beats a thorough one you abandoned on day nine — and if anything in the record worries you, the right next step is your pediatrician, with your notes in hand.