fruit bars are something we avoided til much later - mostly from a sugar perspective. she has the occassionally now (they were a life saver on road trip) but i still try to limit the number she has. same with biscuits. we tend to have milk arrowroot or marie type biscuits in the house, and have done all along. she occassionally got maybe half a biscuit but again, rarely - mostly from the sugar factor.

we didn't try bread til about 8 or nine months - mostly because of the fact it tended to go a bit gluggy and sticky in her mouth and she'd be trying to spit it out and we'd end up having to help her. toast she had for breakfast pretty much from 6.5 months, crusts we'd give her - just the soft doughy bread we waited on. we also used grainy bread - we don't have white bread for us, so didn't see the point for her. i have read that some people think grainy bread isn't such a great idea, but E never had any dramas with it (and turns her nose up at white bread sometimes now - my mum has actually got a loaf of grainy bread in the freezer just for Miss E!)

teething rusks we founds were a great idea as she was learning to grasp food and get it in the right place, without having a lot of wastage from food breaking and being too small for her to grasp. she would be entertained for ages while we cooked - sitting in her high chair. we also gave her a spoon at every meal - even before she was eating much - and let her play to learn about hand eye coordination. it helped heaps i believe

have a good read of the BLS thread - one thing that was a sanity saver for me was reading that babies WILL sometimes "choke" - but it's not really choking. it's more that they get food a bit far down and then cough it back up. panicking doesn't help - you just monitor and see if it is a real problem after a couple of seconds, or whether she has cleared it herself (you can generally tell by their coloring if it is a genuine problem or just a reflex action to get something up that went down a bit big). it takes some getting used to the idea of not stressing, and of course, you still need to be vigilant! one of E's first big words was "youright?" i think we said it a lot to her!

i guess the biggest advice i can give you is to trust your gut - and trust K. if you think what you're having seems like something she could handle, give her a go. babies still have a really strong tongue thrust reflex, so she will spit out what she doesn't want.

and if you make spag bol - put heaps of veg in it and let her go to town - it's messy, but the tastes and textures are great for her. E will now eat capsicum raw (straight from the plant if we're not careful) and prefers food with a bit of bite, rather than bland (hence her refusing the sausage roll at the playground - was a really boring sausage roll compared to the ones her daddy makes!)