Hi Ginsmyname.
Thought I’d jump on this post as also a first time clueless mum - sometimes I feel like the only person that doesn’t intuitively know exactly what to do with these things!
My twins were born 2 months premature and hospital dietician advice was to wean at 4 months corrected age so we started 3 weeks ago (they are 6 months actual age).
My sister followed Annabel Karmel so that’s what I’m doing in terms of recipes and food prep.
Currently they have milk about every 4 hours and still wake for feeds overnight (7am, 11am, 3pm, 6.30pm, 10.30pm, 2am). I started the weaning process just by giving a little baby rice with their morning milk and now have switched that up to baby porridge (just coz porridge feels more breakfast-y!). After a few days, I added in a purée at around 2.30pm before their afternoon milk.
I’m holding off on offering finger food as they are still behind on their development due to being prem and I don’t feel like their hand/mouth coordination is quite up to scratch yet.
My next move will be to introduce another purée before their late morning milk, so effectively they will be having 3 solid ‘meals’ a day. Each meal currently consists of just 3/4 spoonfulls so not sure it can count as a proper meal?? I had planned on starting with the late morning purée this week but having read other posts i think I am going to hold off as lots of other people saying they shouldn’t be expected to have 3 meals till 8/9 months, and 3 weeks is very quick for them to go from purely milk to 3 meals a day.
So my tactic is basically to take it slow, offer large variety of purees and once they start getting more hands-y, start offering finger foods like rice cakes and steamed carrot batons in between their normal milk feed. I’m thinking I’ll start giving finger foods at about 5pm as this will hopefully kill two birds with one stone and help with their notoriously fussy hour between 5pm-6pm before bathtime starts!
I assuming that long-term, some of the milk feeds will be replaced by purely solids. My new confusion is how I get from my current milk times to more ‘normal’ meal times. I’ve seen so many other posts with people talking about lunch and dinner and I’m like, my babies eat at 11am and 3pm, they don’t have lunch! I’ll be interested to see how other people got from this common 4 hour feeding schedule to proper meal times?
Hope this helps you a bit as a starting point anyway!