Who gave you advice/guidelines on weaning?

[spekulatius]

How do you know what to give first, how much, how often, what not to give etc. Obviously I know a lot of things from friends and through internet but shouldn't there be a health care professional giving some guidance? I thought I would just go with instinct but the more I read the more complicated it gets. Last time I saw HV was at 6 week check and won't see her again til baby is 1 year old. So who do I speak to or is it a matter of reading up on it myself?

In Scotland I was given the pamphlet Fun First Foods by the NHS. I think it is excellent. You can google it and download a copy.

You can ring your HV for advice any time and go along to your local well baby clinic for face to face advice.

Your local children's centre should be able to advise about weaning too.

Here's the most current leaflet you'll get from your HV or CC on starting solid foods.

I got it from mumsnet!

My health visitor gave me some advice which totally contradicted guidelines. All of my NCT friends were told totally different things by their health visitors too. I ended up reading on here and making my own choice.

My health visitor came to see me for the "weaning talk" at 8 weeks, which seemed to consist of

1. don't wean yet
2. guidelines are 6 months but noone ever does that round here
3. try to get to 17 weeks if you can

And the booklet that TheSurgeonsMate mentioned.

I kind of got most of it off mumsnet really, plus seeing family and friends' experience. I was quite keen to get to 6 months and then just skip the puree stage, and as it goes that's pretty much how it worked out.

It depends on your baby, but the later you leave it, the less "rules" you seem to need to follow, so I just did finger food and mashed stuff that seemed like ds would enjoy. Avoided too much salt and really hard stuff like raw carrot or apple for the first wee while, and did 3 small meals a day where he just ate what he wanted. I think I was quite lucky that ds was very unfussy about textures though so he was very easy to wean.