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Yeah, we start with chicken broth (homemade only, boiled with the bones, and no added starches,) then after increasing amounts for about a week, we move up to heavily steamed, pureed veggies, then bananas, then harder-to-digest fruits, then actual meat proteins. No more than one new food every 4-5 days. Meanwhile we taper off the formula to balance how many calories they're getting from the other stuff.
We already started with Minifobette. She drank a little of the broth at first out of curiosity, but after the first day she refused it. But she's always been the picky eater, very opposed to anything new, so I didn't think it was from digestive pain. When I make the big batch of broth, I freeze it in ice cube trays, so I can thaw as many tiny servings as I want and save the rest. We started adding one melted cube of broth at a time to her formula cups, and by now we're up to four, which is like 1/2 cup at a time, so she's holding steady at a total of 2 cups per day. Poop is still terrible, but adding the broth didn't change it in any way, so that's something I guess. We've obviously given up on the elemental formula fixing her digestion outright.
Monday is butternut squash day (version 2.) Version 1, I tried to give her a tiny piece of heavily steamed squash, about 1 cubic centimeter--and before she could even swallow it, she projectile vomited all over me. But it couldn't have been a digestive reaction to it, because like I said, she didn't even swallow it. It was just nausea from the new, unexpected taste. At this point she's so sensitive she can even tell when I switch to a new batch of broth. So instead I'm going to try putting a tablespoon of truly pureed, watered-down butternut squash in her formula along with the chicken broth, and slowly build up the flavors. Hopefully after that goes on for awhile she'll tolerate a semi-solid piece of it, and we can start scaling back the number of formula scoops in her cups until she's just drinking chicken broth and water.
The big thing we have to watch out for is the overlap schedule--we can't take away all of the formula until she's got a good amount of bananas going at least, because with just chicken broth and veggies she won't be getting any meaningful carbs (unless we used a starchy vegetable like sweet potatoes, which we're supposed to avoid in the beginning as they're harder to digest,) and baby brains need sugar far more than adult brains do.
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