When my daughter was about four and half months old, she started to lose weight. I took her to the health visitor on a weekly basis to get her weighed and we started talking about weaning. When she got to about 20 weeks, she suddenly developed an insatiable appetite and couldn’t get enough milk. It felt like she had transformed over night. At the previous week’s visit, the health visitor had said that she might be ready but that I would know, so I thought that this was it!
As advised we started off on a couple of spoons of baby rice with lots of milk. The faces that my daughter pulled were priceless. She obviously didn’t like baby rice at all! After about a week of non-committal lunches, a friend suggested trying avocado or banana. Well, these were huge successes and from going from eating hardly any baby rice, my daughter was eating a quarter of an avocado or banana in one go.
I found the next stage quite difficult because my local NHS Trust supports baby led weaning. This is when you give well cooked pieces of food – carrots, broccoli, banana – to your baby and they feed themselves. However, you can’t start this until your baby is over six months and my daughter was just over five. The health visitor was reluctant to give me advise on feeding my daughter purees and certainly would not recommend it to any of my friends who were interested in starting.
I thought I would just follow my daughter’s lead and see what she fancied. Quite quickly I introduced an evening meal, at around five o’clock and then about a week to ten days later, I introduced breakfast which went down a treat!
Before we started weaning, I had pureed a large amount of food which had been frozen. The problem was that my daughter just didn’t seem interested! All she would eat was bananas and avocados. I spoke to a friend of mine with a toddler and she said that she had also had the same problem with home cooked food, when her daughter was really little. She suggested trying some bought food for a little while as it is a lot smoother. This was the best advice I could have received. Although I’m not too happy that my daughter isn’t getting my lovely home cooked stuff, she is eating really well and has regained weight. We’re still in the early stages so I will definitely be cooking a load more food, but for now we’ll just stick with what works.
