Newborn and custard

[MrsXx4]

Mainly posting here for traffic because I really don’t think I am being at all unreasonable!! I am fuming! I left my 5 week old baby in my husbands ‘capable’ hands for 2 minutes while I went to hang some washing up and when I came downstairs husband was feeding him custard (an M&S microwave custard - not baby food) from his finger! Letting baby suck it from his finger!

I am so angry but do I also need to worry about baby? Husband has got angry saying I have over reacted in being so mad! Baby was sleeping on me a second ago as I took him off of husband but now he has taken him off me and baby is screaming!!

As I said, try “My mil gave my 5 week old baby custard- am I right to not let her have unsupervised access again?” and see what responses you get!

Ew, no one was suggesting that guidelines are strict rules for all. The point is that there are no current guidelines that recommend introducing solids (for any child) at 3 months, 4 months or similar, whether for allergies reasons or anything else. The current advice is "around 6 months" and never before 17 weeks. It's not a difficult thing to understand or stick to. Clearly babies with specific medical issues under the care of the relevant HCPs will get advice specific them.

BertrandRussell
As I said, try “My mil gave my 5 week old baby custard- am I right to not let her have unsupervised access again?” and see what responses you get!

I think you'd be advised to go no contact.

Fast forward 8/9/10 month when this baby is crawling in the garden and eats soil/grass/gravel/sand

“Fast forward 8/9/10 month when this baby is crawling in the garden and eats soil/grass/gravel/sand”
That makes no sense. Fast forward 16 years and this baby will be driving a car!

And the guidelines about weaning babies have changed very little for the past 23 years at least.

And the guidelines about weaning babies have changed very little for the past 23 years at least.

More 15 years than 23, it wasn't until 2003 (maybe 2002? Can't Google right now as it keeps crashing my phone) that the WHO recommended exclusive breastfeeding for the first six months, prior to that the guideline was to start somewhere between 17wks and six months.

There's one guide I remember seeing from the 1950s that recommends a daily dose of cereal from around three days of age

NHS advice ten years ago, according to the leaflet I was given when DS was a baby, was to wait until six months where possible but if you had to start before that you should give nothing at all before 17wks.

Quite a lot written about earlier weaning, including this in the New Scientist.

I was one of those who did what I was told by the HV in the late 1990sand weaned at around 16 weeks.

www.google.co.uk/amp/s/www.newscientist.com/article/dn28366-should-babies-be-given-solids-earlier-to-prevent-food-allergies/amp/

I dragged out my dd’s red book to settle a similar discussion- in 1996 it was as close to 6 months as possible but definitely not before 4 months .

2003 the recommended weaning age was 4 months.
A few years later at 2008 they'd changed it to 6 months.

“2003 the recommended weaning age was 4 months.”

No it wasn’t. It was minimum 4 months. I have the red books to prove it from 1996 and 2001.

Flamin' eck, will rephrase then if we're being picky.
Yes, I know it was a recommended minimum of 4 months.
As in it was perfectly acceptable and the norm to wean from 4 months onward.
Which is what I said.

Sorry to be picky! But the recommendation was 6 months but if you really felt that you couldn’t do that then 4 months as an absolute minimum. Which is different from saying that 4 months was the recommendation.

I've scrolled past a lot of the discussion as I don't think it's as important as what the Op was actually saying in her first post.
Notanotman hit the nail on the head when they talked about how the DH reacted and his subsequent behaviour.
He sounds like he's jealous, only you will know if he's jealous of you or of the baby or a bit if both. Or neither of course. But a man who would take my baby off me because he ". Felt bad" is a dick. And a dick who may not be able to be trusted with knowing what is advisable or not when caring for a tiny baby. Is he the sort of man who is so defensive that they're always right?
You need to have a conversation with him Op about the way forward. Hopefully when neither of you are too sleep deprived , if that's possible.
Good luck. Trust your instincts. And congratulations on your lovely baby.

So the recommendation was six months but if you decided not to wait that long nothing then it was recommended nothing before four months. A quick Google (working now!) tells me that in 2000 around 49% of babies were having solids at four months and by 2010, a few years after the guideline was changed to nothing before six months, this had dropped to 30% however 75% were having solids by the age of five months. I wonder what the stats would be now.

I’ve just looked through my children’s red books from 1997 and 1998 and can’t see any recommended weaning time?

I remember health visitors telling us 16 weeks was earliest.

@MrsXx4 - when your husband took your son back, was it because he was angry with you?

My ex would take my daughter off me if we'd had an argument/disagreement and he was angry with me. He would then cuddle or whatever for a short time and the plop her down next to him and start playing on his phone. I always saw it as him trying to control me using our daughter. I remember one evening he was trying to shovel so much food down her neck when she was weaning and he was insisting she was hungry, and trying to give her more food. I told him it was too much and my parents were there and backed me up. He stormed out with our daughter in the pushchair and then came home at least a couple of hours later, around 10pm!

I don't have any useful suggestions and I might be jumping the gun, but your husband's behaviour strikes a chord! Hopefully I'm reading too much into this.

OP- of course you're furious and upset, and actually I understand the language of the baby being 'ruined'. Mine had had six doses of different antibiotics at two weeks old and one of the things I still feel terrible about is that all the research suggests it will have irreversibly affected the microbiome in her gut. I feel bad I couldn't protect her from that. She was so perfect and obviously she as a baby is still perfect but something was introduced to her system which will have done potential damage and with a baby so tiny that can feel devastating when your job as a parent is to protect them from harm. If she were a five year old on her fifth ear infection it would obviously have felt different but their systems are so fragile at that age.

To all the early weaning proponents, I find it odd that the focus of the argument is 'it didn't do anyone any harm' when actually the growth in people with intolerances and IBS over the last few decades is staggering. It would make sense there would be a connection on a population level - certainly I don't think you can say that the generations weaned early show no ill effects because as those generations have the worst gut health we've ever seen, whether it's connected or not. (And it will be fascinating to see what happens when the generation weaned at six months all hit peak IBS age)

As a child in the eighties, I was knocked unconscious in a car crash and suffered headaches for years. It was before seatbelts in the back of cars were a legal requirement: nowadays I'd have been in a high backed booster and completely unscathed. But still people complain boosters and rear facing is unnecessary and everyone was fine. Recommendations change for a reason.

The reasoning behind saying "babies were weaned at 12wks back in my day and were fine" is to illustrate that they didn't shrivel up and implode because someone fed them food and that was daily food, therefore a baby having a solitary lick of custard is also likely not to shrivel up and implode.

This thread is like an encapsulation of Mumsnet. It has everything...ring 111, LTB, what if your mother-in-law did that.... as well as all the bunfighting!
Fabulous.
I'm intrigued by people who can be arsed to go and find their red books over this!

To the OP I'd say... custard isn't the best idea, but I'm sure your husband knows that now. Perfectly normal for you to overreact (these other people...not so much!). I hope your baby is OK...I'm sure he will be...and that you and your DH are getting on better soon. Lots of couples find it hard in the early days, sleep deprivation and finding your feet with a newborn is not easy.

I must have done it wrong, I weaned 5 year old DS and 2 year old DD at 4 months

FIL gave DC1 a lick of soft serve ice cream before he was weaned. I was for about 1 second then told FIL he would forever have to buy DC ice cream as he’d given DC the taste for it