It seems that almost as soon as you have got the hang of feeding your new baby (whether that be breastfeeding, bottle feeding, or a combination of the two) the health visitors are already giving you reams and reams of leaflets and chatting to you about weaning. At the moment, we get told to start thinking about weaning when the infant is 4-6 months old. Whereas it is good to be informed of the latest guidance when it comes to such things (my mother laughed and told me she didn’t know when she was supposed to start me on solids and so she ended up in tears round at her friend’s house sobbing over the fact that the then 4 week old me couldn’t handle fine dining yet……sorry mum but I WAS 4 WEEKS OLD) all of this information can leave you feeling overwhelmed at a very vulnerable time in your life. Feeding a new baby is not always plain sailing and so sometimes the last thing you want to concern yourself with at that moment in time is having to produce your own a la carte in preparation to feed the thing solids.
I was mostly inspired to write something about weaning due to my own experiences, but also after I got a few messages from a friend who had felt upset after her health visitor looked concerned by the fact that her 6 month old didn’t seem to be overly interested in finger foods. The two of us started chatting about how Instagram accounts chronicling the so-called “weaning journeys” of several little tots featuring gourmet meals (all made from scratch, apparently) presented to 4 month olds three times a day, which they are apparently eating in their entireties, quite often panic and upset people and make them feel like they are failing. If you are one of these people who is concerned, rest assured- you aren’t failing- it’s not all so easy.
Let me tell you right now, my meal table is not some picture perfect instagram dream. The reality of infant dining in my household is as follows: a filthy toddler covered head to toe (yes, literally) in grim looking morsels of variously coloured foods. The floor (it’s hardwood by the way, thank GOODNESS I didn’t opt for a white or cream coloured carpet in my blissfully ignorant pre-child phase) a minefield of half-chewed, squashed foodstuffs. It is messy as heck. It is worse than when, in your student days, you thought it was an excellent idea to share chips, cheese, ketchup and gravy sauce on a white sofa whilst wearing a white outfit whilst intoxicated on Cheeky Vimtos and Snakebite with your equally inebriated mate and then falling asleep halfway through with the food balanced precariously on your knee. In other words, don’t even bother to try and prevent mess. It is inevitable. A baby has way less coordination when it comes to food than the aforementioned drunken student. Just make sure you stock up on plenty of cleaning products and baby wipes and lower your standards immediately!
To make things worse, you will hear stories of how other people’s kids eat gourmet meals three times daily from 4 months on the dot. “He/she ate curry, fish, CURRIED FISH, an ENTIRE ROAST DINNER!” they cry with smug elation (they probably haven’t eaten anything of the sort by the way, since their stomach is virtually the size of a postage stamp). The aforementioned glossy Instagram accounts (aka largely a nonsensical hodgepodge of utter fantasy and blatant gloating intending to make mere mortals feel grossly inadequate perhaps not so unintentionally) serve to drive these stories even deeper into your subconscious. As you flick through photos of colourful meals presented on impractical looking plates, toddlers feasting on ostentatious looking dishes on holiday beside the glistening waters of a swimming pool (with no food round their smiling mouths, I hasten to add), and immaculate kitchens apparently untouched by the destruction of what I like to refer to as “feeding time at the Zoo for Rabid Animals” (aka meal time at my house) you may find yourself feeling worse and worse by the second if your kid isn’t devouring anything and everything they are presented with (even if the cuisine is so bizarre that even a seasoned food critic wouldn’t feel comfortable plunging their cutlery into it and shovelling it into their mouth without a second thought). Do not worry if you find your kid isn’t eating like a king at the tender age of 4-6 months or if they seem to be fussy, hopefully I can ease some of your anxieties.
Generally speaking, you have three options regarding weaning. One, you can “spoon feed” your baby, two you can choose “baby lead weaning” (BLW), or three, you can adopt a combination of options one and two. These options are discussed in more detail below.
Spoon Feeding. Usually starting with purees (dreadful looking mushed up food that I wouldn’t contemplate eating even if you paid me), you will find yourself making a variety of ridiculous automobile/machinery related sounds as you attempt to get more of the stuff into the baby rather than onto the baby using a spoon. Popular sounds include aeroplanes and trains. I even bought an aeroplane-shaped spoon to try and make this charade more believable. You can purchase ready-prepared pureed foods from a variety of supermarkets, or you can create the purees yourself using a blender. If you are acquainted with lots of fellow mums who are telling you all about every meal they have made “from scratch” at home for their little one, some of you may be pleased to hear that I am much too lazy for this (especially because, as you will discover, most of it will not end up at it’s intended destination of in the baby’s mouth/belly) so I tend to purchase ready-made purees to save myself the hassle of making my own. Several resources will remind you that the baby has a tiny stomach in the early days, and so they usually don’t need to start with much more than an ice cube-sized portion of puree at each meal. Many books recommend freezing purees in batches using ice cube moulds and defrosting them when needed.
Baby Lead weaning (BLW). This involves offering the baby a variety of “adult foods” and allowing them to “explore” and eat them themselves. I would be lying if I didn’t say that initially BLW filled me with dread. My husband is a total neat freak and basically becomes paralysed with anxiety if he sees a spec of dust that has been missed during a deep clean (yes, he’s a loser). I have always been more laid back and frequently chastised him for being so ridiculous over “nothing”. However, when I saw pictures of infants whose mothers advocated BLW, I have to say, I got palpitations and suddenly understood how he felt. I was traumatised by pictures of babies caked head to toe in the most vibrant of foodstuffs (spaghetti bolognese looks especially hideous when one is wearing it rather than eating it, by the way). No way was I doing that. BLW also does yield a lot of waste, especially in the early days when a lot of the stuff ends up on the floor, on the baby, in the baby’s hair, or…..the worst part……on YOU! A lot of people advocate BLW because it gets the infants exploring various flavours and textures from day one and allows them to try and feed themselves from the beginning. With BLW, infants can try most things- Willy Wonka’s Everlasting Gobstoppers perhaps not- but most other things are ok (check websites, leaflets and get advice from healthcare professionals to be sure what is advised and what isn’t). My kids have come up with some exceptionally unappetising combinations when left to their own devices- french bread dipped in apricot flavoured yoghurt with ketchup on it springs immediately to mind (yuck!)
I asked a few friends who had been there before me about the approach they decided to take. Most of them said they ended up doing option three- the combination. Feeling repulsed, I said I would be spoon feeding-end of- and left it at that. You could say, therefore, that what happened next was well-deserved karma.
My mum said I ate on time, was breastfed for 2 years until I gave it up of my own free will and I slept for a decent stretch at night from approximately 10 weeks. I suppose you could say I was somewhat of a textbook baby (or she’s forgotten what a difficult one I was and chooses to tell people that I was a doddle to raise). As a result, assuming that such behaviour was entirely genetic and inherited solely from the mother’s side, I expected my kids to be textbook too. I was therefore more than a bit put out when Henry (my eldest) turned his nose up at virtually everything I offered him and refused flatly to be spoon fed. This meant I had to go with BLW (drat!). To make matters worse, trying BLW just lead to EVERYTHING ending up on the floor or on him/me. He essentially seemed to be eating nothing whatsoever. I was stressed to say the least. Everyone I spoke to seemed to have food-loving, compliant babies. Aside from putting the kid in a headlock and force-feeding him, I was running out of ideas.
Then, one day, my perspective completely changed. I was round at a friend’s house and we were sat around the dinner table. There were four of us in total (all friends from university) and we had four of our children with us. After laughing about the fact that we never thought on the first day of uni when we were fresh faced 18 year olds that we would find ourselves sat here with our children years later, it was time for dinner to be served. I started to feel ashamed when I said that Henry probably wouldn’t eat anything that was put in front of him. I felt like they were going to think I was a failure as a mother and report me to social services because my child was going to slowly waste away due to lack of nutrition. At this little toddlers’ tea party, two were great eaters. They wolfed down anything and everything they were offered; smoked salmon, avocado, potato etc. You name it, they ate it. One of my friend’s daughters, who was only a couple of months younger than Henry, chucked one of her rice cakes on to the floor after deciding she didn’t fancy another of those and it rolled under the table, out of sight. This discarding of food had not gone unnoticed to another of the little guests, who snuck under the table and yoinked it straight from where it had fallen. Giggling, she looked at it as if to say “I’ll have that” and hoovered it up in one swift mouthful. As she happily munched away on the others’ cast offs, I was feeling so deflated. Henry would eat ZERO. Here he was, surrounded by mini food enthusiasts and still nothing. This was when things got better though, because my friend who is a GP (I’m an anaesthetist so rather than advising on weaning my job is to starve people prior to surgery, so I have no clue!) turned to me and said “it’s frustrating isn’t it when they don’t eat? Especially when these two are really showing the others up!” She said that her eldest had been, and still was, a terrible eater but that she hadn’t let it worry her because “food is only for fun until they are one. It doesn’t matter if they eat it, put it in their hair, throw it on the floor, put it down their nappy. They don’t really need it until they are one. Until then they should be offered it and can eat as much or as little as they like. Eventually they will eat. So don’t worry about Henry. He will eat sooner rather than later.”
Well, this was like music to my ears. Finally some honesty and solidarity! Following this, several confessions came pouring in from fellow mums whose kids hadn’t really eaten until after they had celebrated their first birthdays. I suddenly felt so much better about Henry’s apparent hunger strike. I heard from people whose children hadn’t eaten much until they were 12, 13, 14, 15 months etc. Henry eventually started eating when he was about 1. He has never allowed me to spoon feed him (he is a stubborn little so and so like his father). I essentially had no choice and had to go with BLW (the karma I was referring to earlier on because the mess repulsed me). When he started nursery, his eating got better and better and before long, he was reliably eating three meals a day with snacks in between. It just took a bit of time. I was more than a bit miffed when I saw the little toad being spoon fed and having his grubby chops wiped at nursery without even wincing because he never did that for me (but then I realised if he’s eating what does it matter?!) He now often tries to feed me. He looks at me and says “aaahhhh” and tries to shove anything and everything into my mouth (probably his way of saying “let’s see how you like it, Mum!”). Essentially, he’s now fine and is a good eater. In fact, he’s like my mum and has a particular preference for food that he sees on someone else’s plate(!). When it came to weaning my second baby, Edward, I was shocked and astounded when he demolished an entire sachet of puree on the first attempt (and he hasn’t looked back since). He will be spoon fed and will feed himself. I guess they are all different. Don’t panic if your kid isn’t a textbook baby, they will eat when they are ready. If that’s at four months great, if it isn’t until they are one, who really cares?! And ignore anyone who unhelpfully broadcasts news of their tremendous 4 month old eater and shows you pictures of their pristine dining area. None of that nonsense is helpful and it’s most likely not true to life either!
