Do annabel karmel's meal planners make anyone else feel completely inadequate?

[babs102]

They are ridiculous, how does anyone have time to prepare that much food?

ahem. read the article i linked to...

I have an NCT friend who witters on about Annabel Karmel. I want to make this face. But I resist. I ignore the withering looks about BLW. The narrowing of the eyes when I pass DS an unsalted chip to chew on. I revel, safe in the knowledge that I do not have to ask harrassed waiting staff to "microwave it for just 10 seconds" or scrape puree off the table or from my hair.

Honestly, I could not be arsed with all that faffing about. DS eats a bit of what we're having if we're eating at a sensible time or he has something he can play with and enjoy and I can pick at.

Annabel Karmel would despise me

Aitch,

Thought this was funny

We were chatting in the kitchen and I said, "It's good you've got all these recipes written down. Because when you're married, your wife will be able to cook the same food you had at home, and your children will be able to cook it and it will live on." And that's a nice thought - that my kids, and then their kids, will be eating Annabel Karmel meals

Control Freak!!

i was just at the casual use of 'your wife'. cos mummy's boy can't cook, obv.

please note she still makes a number of choices for him every meal, and he's at uni.

Imagine if she was your MIL... there'd be some serious threads

OMG
a) She should be ashamed that her son at 18 has never cooked chicken
b) she is going to be the mil from hell. 'Your wife can cook you the same food you had at home'

Milk- you can use an ordinary ice cube tray and shove it in a freezer bag- problem solved

life is so much simpler without Annabel Carmel

weaning is a long time ago as far as I am concerned but as far as I remember it involved mashing a piece of my own potato and shoving it into dd's mouth (before BLW was de rigueur) or at a slightly later date letting her clutch a carrot, none of this three course nonsense

Annabel Karmel is just ridiculous - with my first baby I tried a few and didn't see the point. We ended up doing BLW by accident, without knowing that it was later to become a 'method'- I just thought that if baby could grab the food himself, convey it to his mouth and manage to actually eat it then he was ready for it. If not, it's hard to see how he's ready for it. I wanted to keep off solids until 6 months, but a couple of weeks beforehand he swiped some melon off a pal and was gumming away on it desperately before anyone could get it off him! Now on baby 5 and I can't see how anyone could possibly find the time to do Annabel Karmel. Incidentally, all 5 kids are good eaters, none have ever had any issues with taking food of different textures - I suspect never having had purees helps with that.
My blunt opinion of the Annabel Karmel approach is that it's a total waste of time and yet another way of trying to get money out of mothers who worry that they're not doing the very best they possibly could. Invest the time in cooking nice food for the rest of your family, and bung baby a chunk of chicken breast, rice cake, lightly-microwaved pear or apple instead. They make less mess with it too.

ahornuk, I haven't seen any evidence that never having purees helps with fussy eating

all the children that are the same age as dd or older will have been brought up on purees for the first few months (we were recommended to start weaning at 4 months)

the children younger than ds have mainly been brought up on blw (though parents with older children tend to be a bit more conservative)

I see no difference in fussiness- the 3yo and 4yos seem to be fussing just as much as they did in dd's day- because it's often a fussy age- and then most of them grow out of it

Why would it make you feel inadequate ?
Take what you want from it. Dismiss the rest. Problem solved.
It upsets me when I hear people feel inadeqaute. Yes she's a bit twee. Yes you prob couldn't manage it all, if you work/have another child etc, but you can still take atleast a few recipes from it.

I take the cory approach to weaning. prepared a couple of purees. At the same time, mashed up what I was having. Gave bits of food aswell, so he fed himself. Very very quickly they were eating what we were.
No problems. No stress. EVER.
Mind you, that was becasue I was blessed with gannets who eat literally anything they are given. I do appreciate that most people don't have it as easy as I did.

But please don't let any book, Ak, GF or anyone else, stress you out.

I thought 'proper' BLW was a mostly breast fed baby, with finger food only offered as addition to breast milk until 1? I asked about doing BLW at the weaning talk 1 yr ago with my DS2 (did good old puree with 1st) and was told it's not reccomended by our health authority! So I did mostly puree etc, but more finger food from a younger age than DS1.

Annabel Karmel is bonkers, but she does good ready meals

I felt very inadequate in those hormonal early days when I read the meal planners. Now I wonder how much small children must be missing out on if their parent is in the kitchen preparing food all day.

To allay any feelings of inadequacy over not being able to prepare 3 completely unnecessary courses of gourmet mush, buy the Gill Rapley book, skip to the photos of babies in the middle, and aim to get your baby looking as happy and messy as the babies depicted. THEN you will feel like the BEST mummy in the world
Meal planners? Out the window

...and then come over here and talk to us about it

One question - does Annabel Karmel look like she hand makes breakfast for her baby? She looks to me like if she did she didn't look how she does now and she probably had a nanny and a cleaner to free up her time so she could hand make her baby's breakfast and then hand the breakfast over to the nanny to do the messy bit while she heads off to the plastic surgeon for a bit of lovely natural poison for putting in her face....

Her son is 18 and didn't recognise a wok?!

And she's training him up to believe that some woman will cook for him for the rest of his life? yikes.

Maybe she just originally wrote the meal planners for the nanny...

I wonder if that's where she got the idea for her recipe empire...

Slime, it's because they don't need all the nutrients etc from an entire chicken dinner - they get the nutrients they need from milk until about age 1 when they are (in theory) starting to prefer solid foods anyway.

I think. And the reason why you can't just feed them a pureed dinner - well you can, but if you let them feed themselves then you can eat at the same time and your dinner doesn't go cold so... pretty much pure laziness.

You get them to eat a balanced diet past age 1 or so because you keep offering them all the parts of the chicken dinner or whatever, you don't just offer one food at each meal apart from in the very beginning. They can feed themselves a chicken and veg dinner easily - the chicken and veg are all handy chunks for picking up and gumming/sucking/chewing on. They would probably struggle with gravy, which I always thought was a good excuse to put salt in it and therefore make it out of bounds to babies.

Hope that makes sense

No, I never used the Meal Planners but I found she did have some good ideas for meals and sandwiches and I found it really useful to know at what age I could give certain foods. No family near by and no friends with kids so I was clueless. I found her book an absolute god send. Got in a Charity shop for a pound as well.

Slime with BLW you do give them the chicken dinner. DS who is almost 7 months had exactly that the other day. He had a bit of brocolli to chomp on, some roast potato, some sweet potato and carrot crush (that was messy and in hindsight a mistake on my part) and a bit of chicken.

He quite happily played and ate. By 2.1 I'd expect him to be eating a lot more than he does now, with hardly any going on the floor and no food in his hair. And I'd give him the gravy too.

BLW is for those of us who just can't be arsed. To pretend it is some big method is disingenuous IMHO