Hux’s Adventures In Weaning

WEANING. A loaded word if I ever heard one.

With your first child you’re desperate for them to take that next step in to gloopy gluey baby rice and are chomping at the bit to get started from month 4. With your second child you dread moving on to inconvenient solids and wonder if you can stretch a milk diet out til month 7… this was my experience at least.

When Elfie started on solids I was a lean weanin’ machine. I ordered organic veg boxes and steamed squash, courgette and carrot until all the windows in my house were covered in condensation. I devoured anything written by Annabel Karmel and as per her instructions made special little lasagnes and pies for my angel. Weaning was a full-time job.

Elfie in 2011. The cute!

When Hux came along it was a different story. I had two kids, I was working and had a house to run: I didn’t have time to steam the crap out of every vegetable under the sun. And so after some research I decided to go the baby-led weaning route, it would fit in brilliantly with our busy lifestyle, Hux could sit up and eat with us and Elfie at the table and there wouldn’t be mountains of ice cube-shaped purées in my freezer. The carpet would become FILTHY despite me putting a mat under his highchair, but hey, hindsight is a wonderful thing and who puts carpet in a kitchen anyway?!

For the most part baby-led weaning has worked brilliantly for Hux. He’s had quite a complex diet from day one; I fed him the usual finger-shaped vegetables (carrots, purple sprouting broccoli, French beans for example) but he also eats lasagne, vegetable pasta, sandwiches, meats, beans, pie… anything you can think of using his hands. The stress involved in introducing him to solids has been incomparable to the stress of weaning Elfie. There’s simply none involved, he just eats what we eat but in his little finger-sized portions. Easy!

The one struggle I’ve found has been with getting fruit into him. I religiously give him a ‘na-na’ after breakfast (he loves them, it was his first word) but he’s otherwise not too keen on the texture of other fruits. This sort of food is really important for him in particular as he does have a tendency to get, erm, ‘blocked up’, so I like to try and get at least his five portions into him daily.

We were recently sent these new Cow & Gate fruit pouches: 6 varieties of 100% fruit which contain 1 whole portion of fruit per pouch. He has one of these for pudding and BOOM! He’s as regular as clockwork again, bless his little bottom. It’s a bit like my early days of religious steaming but without the faff of the steamer.

Fruit pouches and yoghurts are the only things the little man eats with a spoon, everything else is finger food. Baked beans, spaghetti bolognese, rice pudding… the messier the better. He also enjoys torn up tortilla wraps, marmite on toast, sticks of avocado, pieces of absolutely any meat you put in front of him, ice cubes, twirly pasta, popcorn, rice cakes, smoked salmon; he loves his food. This means his hand-eye co-ordination is pretty brilliant (he throws a ball like a BOSS) and I’m sure he’s slightly further on cognitively than Elfie was at this stage.

I know baby-led weaning isn’t for everyone but it’s definitely been the best way for us to wean, ruined carpet or not.