Baby given chocolate!

[areandare]

I would like honest feedback / opinions on this please as I don’t know if I’m overreacting and am happy to be told that I am.

My baby is 9 months old. He started weaning at 6 months and I have taken it quite seriously to do it as best as I can. Weaning books, trying home made recipes, introducing veggies before fruits, etc.

My partners parents like to have him once a week for a couple of hours to spend time with him and to prepare for when I return to work as they will be minding him for one day. Last week when I picked him up, MIL smugly told me “he had some chocolate today”. I was a bit taken back as I thought she was joking.

It turns out that she had broken up chocolate in to little pieces and given it to him. He has never had chocolate before , he was gifted a few Easter eggs and we still hadn’t given any to him.

I have a few issues with this.

1. The chocolate could be a choking hazard, everything that I have read says to melt it
2. She knows how I feel about giving him chocolate, and she didn’t even ask she just took it upon herself to give him it
3. This one sounds petty - but I would have liked to have been the one to give him his first taste of chocolate when I felt ready 😔

What do others think? Should I say anything or just leave it? I might be overreacting but I feel quite hurt by it. I feel quite strongly about a 9 month old not needing chocolate right now (no disrespect to those who give it) but he’s so happy with yogurt, fruit, etc so really doesn’t need chocolate as a treat yet.

I don’t see why they even want to see him if they’re going to just plonk him in front of the tele. I get it if they enjoy taking him to the park, playing and interacting with him, but
the screen thing I don’t get.

Tbf nobody “needs” chocolate in their diet just a nice treat occasionally

I'm not sure why people would want to habituate their children to eating sugary crap at such a young age?
Sure, it's going to all around them when they're a bit older and you probably can't stop all of it without turning it into an issue, but why as a baby when they don't know any different?
At that point it's purely for the grandparent's pleasure - like a human petting zoo.

This is the strangest thing to me. Maybe they want to tell friends they're doing childcare? Or it's just what they're used to? I have found with family vs new generation of parents, there's different expectations of what's appropriate at different ages.

Also something I'm finding atm, why do family just not listen to parents saying something is in a baby's routine and it works for them every other day, seems to make them the most comfortable so could you also do this for consistency please?

I don't want to start yet another grandparent thread but my lovely MIL who has mine one day a week while he's on the waiting list for a third day at nursery has rarely followed his nap routine. We kept thinking we weren't communicating it well enough, DH was insisting she must be forgetting what we'd said every week (I said she's really intelligent and capable, and we kept reiterating it, plus I was the one doing drop offs and pick ups and having the in person interactions). After DH started calling on the day to check she wasn't trying to get out DS to sleep after 3pm - she kept attempting it at 3.30, close to 4pm when I'd collect him usually - she did stop but will still say every week that he's tired and wants to sleep, if he lived there then she'd let him sleep.

His routine changed and now she keeps getting him to nap early, so taking him on a walk in the pram until he goes to sleep. He's on one nap a day unless he's had a ridiculously early start to the day like 4.30am, in which case I'd always tell her. But it means instead of one good nap after lunch, he might have 1-2 hours in the morning, a late lunch, then by the time I get him I have to rush him home, give him dinner and rush bath and bed because he's been up since 11 something. And then he's usually overtired, screaming and much harder to get down at bedtime whereas if we time it right, he's quite happy to have me rub his back as he goes to sleep.

DH is going to speak to her again and say we normally give him a little snack at 10.30 instead of trying to get him to sleep then (or before!) and also ask if it's too much for them.

We've just been given the option of a third day at nursery from summer but now we feel bad because DS and his grandma have such a lovely bond and she really seems to enjoy it. Obv first priority is does she even want to carry on. But she just doesn't listen about the nap routine, just says "noted" when I say eg he woke up normal time today so he'll just want one nap after lunch, then when I get him she tells me she's done something different. More stressful for me and leaves DS uncomfortable and cranky after a certain time (which she can also see? But thinks he should just sleep again but he won't even when I've tried it?). It's disappointing as she's otherwise so great.