Still feeling rather frustrated after yet another 'debate' with my family about the fact I haven't started weaning my son onto solids yet.
He's my second child and a very healthy bouncing baby - has been steadily on the 91st centile since birth and is a very content little chappy in general. He still wakes up once a night, but I'm taking that as perfectly reasonable for a baby at his age.
However, since he was literally 10 weeks old, my parents have been obsessed with the fact that 'he needs a bit of proper food to get him sleeping through the night'. Now, I know that things were different in their day, and I know that many people still choose to wean their children earlier than six months, and I would happily take on board their comments and smile sweetly, if it wasn't for the constant muttering every time they think I've turned away!
Last night it was the fact that I wouldn't let him eat some ice cream at a family barbecue...when I said I'd rather they didn't try and feed it to him my dad told my db that 'mothers today are ridiculous, I was given evaporated milk from birth and it didn't do any harm."
A few minutes later he couldn't resist but say to me that "you were given ice cream as a baby, why isn't it good enough for your ds."
Now the background to this is that a large number of my family have stomach and bowel problems - my nan and aunt suffer with crohns and my dad and me have irritable bowel syndrome, which plagues our lives.
All the reading I've done says the risk of those kind of illnesses in later life is reduced if you wait until six months to wean. I have also struggled with my weight throughout my life...so when my dad tells me I was on a can of beans and a fried egg for dinner at three months, it doesn't particularly strike me as a good thing.
I'm absolutely not judging anybody else's decisions and I don't want to snap back at my parents anything that might sound as if I blame them for my stomach problems, but I'm getting a little tired of being made out to be an over protective, neurotic mother!
So , would I be unreasonable to lay out all the reasons for not weaning before six months, given the medical evidence and our personal family history, or should I just continue to smile sweetly and let them think I'm being psb (precious second born!).