my weaning hell.long sorry.....

[weaninghell]

dd is nearly 14 months and still goes some days with having next to nothing to eat, maybe a couple of bites of this or that.she will still drink her milk so im not majorly panicking but like i say alot of days its next to nothing.i have struggled to get her to eat from day one really, started her at 6 months.she has never been a big eater although a few months ago we had a breakthrough and she was starting to eat fairly well but i feel like im bk to square one because shes being v fussy again.for example, she will sleep all night then in the morning i will wait an hour or so to make sure shes going to be hungry and she still wont eat what i give her whether it be cereal, toast, scrambled egg, boiled egg, you name it ive tried it. she will have a few bites of fruit, that seems to be something she will eat.ive tried blw,puree and ive tried jars in desperation,
at the last docs appntmnt her weight etc was fine but i cant help thinking thats prob the milk?????? shes had a bad cold recently so its next to nothing again.
what should i do? sorry for the essay and thanks for reading

oh you poor thing, you sound pretty stressed. i have a friend who's wee boy just didn't really like anything but milk until he was two, luckily he was her third child and was highly robust and growing well and so she wasn't that fussed. he's four now, eats fine afaik.

what do you want to do? do you think there's anything wrong with her, really? do you think the cold might be putting her off her food? certainly dd (22mos) goes right off food if she's teething or ill and at 14 months she was only just beginning to cut down on her milk and replace it with solids.

more for my benefit than hers, i think, i tend to give dd some multivits and some fish oils when she's not eating, and that makes me think i'm doing something so i don't get stressed. then she has some pasta and pesto waved under her nose and that gets her started again. what does your gut instinct tell you? do you think there's an underlying problem or do you think she just really likes milk?

It sounds soooo stressful but I'm a big believer in the idea that they eat what they instinctively need to eat.

Mine are similar to aitch's - when they're poorly they cut down on food and prefer milk instead. It makes sense - milk is the best, most easily digested, complete form of nutrition.

In your shoes, I'd be really careful about not letting her see that it's a bother for you. They're so quick to pick up these things and you wouldn't want it to become an Ishoo.

When mine don't eat I do this Academy-Award winning show of matter-of-fact indifference, make sure there's food available if they want it, and just leave it at that. No attempts at persuasion whatsoever. Has worked well so far.

Good luck!

talking of babies eating what they need to... have a look at this and this

it won't help you to get her to eat more, but it's Totally Interesting with regards to children selecting what they want to eat and might just give you a crumb of comfort.

What excellent articles, aitch. I couldn't agree more.

weaninghell, forgot to say, my 16 month old is still getting loads of milk - I think it's very normal. There's a big race to get them off milk and onto solids as if milk is terrible stuff and wanting it is "immature" - but there's no basis for this objectively.

i know, that science chum of mine really knows what she's talking about, doesn't she? i do blooming love that paper, though, truly.
imagine if we had that data now... i'd love to know about the wee boy with rickets.
oddly, i noticed in the Penelope Leach book it says (noticeably vaguely, i felt) that there was some research done in a nursery school in london in the 20s where children selected a healthy diet for themselves - she couldn't have been talking about Clara, could she? pretty shoddy if so.

good luck for tomorrow and beyond, weaninghell. you might be going through hell but it sounds like dd is pootling along quite nicely, you know.

Yes, imagine having 6 years of unique diet data on your computer, along with some good stats software [wistful]

I too am wondering what happened to those children later. Did they go mad for burgers? What was their health like in old age? What did they think about being guinea pigs?

Dunno about the study PL alludes to. Very naughty of her not to name her sources. I'll have a look and see what I can find, but online searches don't usually go back that far.

weaninghell, , sorry to have derailed your thread talking about other stuff, but there is a vague connection with your dilemma! Aitch and I are both very interested in the idea of babies instinctively choosing a balanced diet, and have discussed this on MN before.

It's a powerful idea because it has the potential to destress a lot of weaning problems - just letting them do their own thing without imposing timetables on them of when they should eat what.

great advice and great links too thank you so much for all your help...it is a big comfort at this majorly stressful time! she is my first too so i think this prob makes it worse as i dont have any other children to compare eating habits etc

they're all really different anyway, or so it seems. there's a great example in a book i read (called 'my child won't eat by carlos gonzales, sounds hard-core but very jolly) where he explains that children don't grow because they eat, they eat because they're growing. so cool i thought.
also he says that if you feed up a poodle, you get a fat poodle. you don't get an alsatian. so your daughter might naturally be a slim poodle.