Weaning help please

[Babydust13]

My little boy is nearly 5 months old so it will soon be time to start thinking about weaning. He's my first baby and it's suddenly dawned on me I have no idea where/how to start?

Please help with any tips or hints I'm starting to feel anxious about it

Thank you

The NHS website has some good basic info: www.nhs.uk/start4life/weaning/

There's also a separate weaning section on mumsnet - under Feed The World, which you might be better posting on.

We did baby led weaning, whereas friends did more traditional weaning... Read up on both and see what you think would work best for you. There's no right or wrong way to do it.

Good luck - relax and enjoy!

@Paris2019 thank you 😊

Also look at Ella's Kitchen website, they have a weaning guide and pack that I found quite useful. I did a mixture of BLW and spoon feeding and it seemed to work well. You need a wipe clean high chair/bib, plenty of time and plenty of patience! Also not to alarm you but look up/YouTube the difference between baby gagging and choking. Gagging is totally normal. Choking obviously not!

Pop a plastic sheet on the floor just before mealtimes to make cleaning up easier and make sure your high chair wipes down easily.
Timing is everything. Choose times when your LO isn’t tired or hungry, so they can concentrate.
Initially, milk will still be their main source of food so don’t worry about how much they eat.
My dc started with single-ingredient foods for the first few weeks so I would be able to pinpoint any food allergies. As I wanted LO to be able to have some of what we were having and I didn’t want to cook anything extra, I had meat-and-two-veg type meals for a few weeks. E.g. salmon and new potatoes, and I just gave Lo some salmon flakes and chunks of new potato. Once your baby has tried and tolerated several single-ingredient foods, you can begin offering mixed dishes.
My dc sometimes had what we’re having, but I usually had to adapt it in some way or omit something from his portion. For example, when we had egg fried rice,I cooked it all until the last stage, took out his portion to let it cool down and then added soy sauce and seasoning to the rest.
If we were having pasta, I’d leave a few pieces of pasta a bit longer in the water so they’d cook really soft and then give them to LO. Basically the same ingredients but minus the salt and cooked a bit softer.

Try not to overthink it.

Weaning is a process where baby will naturally start to take more food and less milk. It's ok for baby to start dropping milk feeds along the way. By 9/10 month both mine were just having 2 milk feeds a day

The best advice we got from our dietician though was to start with breakfast.

Offer weetabix, or porridge, toast, fruit, baby rice, anything like that. You can make cereal with cows milk if you want.

Keep breakfast simple and the same. She said to do breakfast first for 2 reasons. First it's an easy meal to make and second you're nearly always at home.

Introduce dinner second as you're almost always at home too. Do lunch last when you've got more experience and baby is eating more. Makes it easier if you want / need to be out of the house during the day.

@Ricekrispie22 @Twizbe thank you that's really helpful I was thinking breakfast was probably a good place to start

Best advice is to think of it as introducing solids as opposed to weaning as we’re not weaning them off milk, just presenting to them solid foods.

Some children don’t have the feed themselves skills until 8 months but that’s totally normal and ok.

No matter what style of feeding (blw or traditional) follow your baby’s cues, when they turn their head away or cry they’re done.

Don’t get caught up on how much they eat, leave it up to them.
Watch salt levels (things like bread contain more salt than you’d think)
Try to feed them what you eat
Family meals
Stress free