Help!

[rachbeck27]

👋 Morning! Hope everyone is well. I have a question about weaning please? I had a terrible time weaning my now 9 year old. I have a 6 month old who thankfully loves food.
Not really sure how I should do it though?! My HV is useless unfortunately.
I started offering him mashed/pureed stuff at Christmas and now he generally has breakfast and one other meal.
He's had weetabix, baby rice, butternut squash, mashed tattie, blended green veggies and some smooth packets of mixed veg.
When can I move him up to 3 meals?! I think he would want them now.
Can I give him our meals yet? And if so, is there anything I should avoid?! (I have blended daal and cottage pie in the freezer.)
Does it matter if u give it to him before or after his bottle?
When can I move him to mashed foods and finger foods? Really concerned about him choking (pretty phobic actually as my daughter choked at 4 years and I left marks on her back dislodging it)
How long do you wait before making stuff even less mashed etc?
Thanks in advance 🤞

My ds was on 2 meals a day very quickly as he also loved food! But we held off on the third meal until 8 months as our HV advised.
I 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 LO 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.
I also made a few alterations to our meals too. For example, I cut carrots into batons rather than coin-shaped pieces (easier for baby to hold and less of a choking hazard).

I'm paranoid about DS choking too. I feel my heart jump into my mouth when he so much as coughs whilst eating!

He's 7 months now and been eating solids for around 4 weeks. I started on puréed fruit and veg for a couple of weeks then my HV advised giving him some lumpier foods as he needs to get used to moving food around in his mouth and swallowing it. I then moved on to mashed foods (cauliflower cheese, broccoli, carrot, etc). He's also had tiny pieces of chicken, scrambled egg, and pasta cut into the smallest pieces.

I tried BLW - toast (suggested by HV), cucumber and banana but I hate it! He's a greedy boy and bites off big chunks which freaks me out so for now, I'm sticking to spoon feeding for my own sake. He had half a rusk today which he fed himself and absolutely loved it!

We give DS 2 solid meals a day - porridge for breakfast and then a 2 course lunch, e.g. cheese and broccoli pasta followed my a yoghurt. He also has 30oz of milk a day spread out over 4 bottles.

The foods to avoid are here, so as long as you avoid those, anything will do, including the food you have, as long as it's low salt.

I can understand your worries about choking but I'd have a look at a couple of videos on what to do. There is definitely a difference between gagging and choking too

If you want to do finger and mashed foods, you can do that now.

There's a good guide here on feeding them fir the first year.

Thank you 💓

Hello, he had some broccoli as finger food yesterday and loved it. I am doing fajitas tonight, could I just blend some chicken and veg for him? Struggling with what 'lumpy' should look like!

You've probably eaten already but I would have probably put a bit of natural yoghurt on to cool down the heat a bit and just given it to him, as long as the mix wasn't too high in salt

I did it very similarly to @Fivemoreminutes1 – the same food as we were having, but cooked a bit longer, cut into suitable shapes, and no salt added until after I'd taken baby's portion out. A bit of yoghurt, or rinse off the sauce, if something is too spicy (although my wee one seems to like a bit of spice!).

And both DH and I brushed up on the difference between gagging and choking and what to do in each case before we started.