Are Ella’s pouches okay to use?

[cornflowersandpoppies]

I mean obviously no babies will be harmed from using them but I am feeling bad about it. I had envisioned organic veg and lovingly prepared meals but it isn’t happening …

They are very sweet - not much fibre. Fine for occasions but not so great for longer term

I’m a long way away from weaning now but I seem to remember DS1 being weaned almost entirely on Ellas pouches.
I never did the finger food thing, but used jars/pouches the whole time. I’ve never felt a moment of guilt!

And if it makes you feel better, i completely forgot to wean DS2! I just remember him desperately trying to get my French Fry when he was nearly 8 months old and I handed it to him and he stuffed it in his mouth. Poor hungry bugger. But he was almost completely Ellas kitchen as well.

Both happy and healthy. Fussy eaters will be fussy whether you lovingly slaved over a hot stove 3 times a day or fed them a pouch out of the cupboard. I don’t think there’s any correlation!!

I used a mix of the EK pouches and home made purées for DD.
When making homemade purée, I'd also give her a cooked piece of the food so she could play with it, try it, mush it up in her hands.

In the early days it's all about trying flavours, rather than eating and loving full meals.

I didn't get on with the wean in 15 book either. I used the Ella's kitchen weaning book and then the "what mummy makes" book. Dd is 18 months now and still goes through fussy stages (particularly when teetering) and will often prefer beans on toast to a home cooked meal, but it's all about balance and trying a new food a few times before they decide to like it

Plus, we still use the fruit purée pouches to add to porridge or to give her medicine as she won't take it from a syringe.

DD2 is 8 months and loves Ella's kitchen. I mentioned this in a baby group the other week and the woman leading the group looked so horrified I might as well have said I was feeding her a doner kebab and a pint every day
We're on the 7m+ range and she eats way more variety in flavour (as DD1 is a fussy 5 year old) Whenever our dinner is suitable I whizz some up and give it to her but you can tell she'd rather have a pouch. She has some finger foods too but was too lazy to do BLW, she'd lean forward and let you put it in her mouth then she'd grab it and throw it straight on the floor

@Heyha if For Aisha did an adult size Shepherds Pie, I'd devour it! Totally my favourite 😂 I forgot about Babease, they were really good too x

I think I need to buy a blender. I think he just finds my food too lumpy.

But he has to just get used to the lumps, there's no actual need to puree food, have you looked up baby led weaning? Much easier than all the blender faff. You can mash bananas or avocados etc for quick snacks, or oats and yoghurt, etc.

He isn’t interested. I thought I’d do BLW but ds had other ideas. Like so many other aspects of motherhood!

@cornflowersandpoppies

I think I need to buy a blender. I think he just finds my food too lumpy.

I used the pouch as a guide to how mushy to make my food. I don't know if that helps? But don't panic, 6 months is very young to be eating much at all.

Thanks, I knew he wouldn’t be eating huge meals but he barely has anything!

I use the mixed fruit ones often as a snack mainly as 14mo DS usually eats we eat for meals. But sometimes if our foods not appropriate or I'm being lazy he gets a pouch instead. Super convienient. It's fine!

It's really normal for a 6 month old who's only just started weaning to barely eat anything. They don't understand what food is yet, it's just something to play with and hopefully some will go in. Some babies take to it really quickly, others take longer. Some prefer purees, others finger food.

I wouldn't bother with a blender unless it's something you'll use anyway. You can use a fork to do most of the work of a blender, and you probably won't need it for long (though I know it feels like you will at the moment).

Like @MsSquiz I used the Ella's Kitchen book as a basis for early weaning and some of the mushy recipes, and then What Mummy Makes is brilliant for around 10m + (or earlier if they really take to it). I also had an Annabel Karmel book which had some nice recipes, and if you start googling you find all sorts of useful things. Suggestions for the size and shape of finger foods were particularly handy.

Nothing wrong with pouches. Especially at the start. I think they get more variety that way anyway. It would be such a waste of fruit and veg for me to purée it and freeze it. I'd get a years worth from 1 carrot lol.

Life's too short sometimes for worrying about this stuff

Agree with PP that at 6 months babies still get all their nutrients from milk. Therefore you are at the stage of teaching him to eat. So he needs to experience different textures and tastes. When starting to wean there is no expectation to actually eat anything- they're just learning what food is and how they deal with it. Gill Rapley is the blw guru and her book explains how to approach meal times and not to worry if everything ends up on the floor. That's normal. You will need to get used to adjusting family meals. I rarely cook with salt now for example, so we can all eat the same. As they get older I'll reintroduce, but I can live without it for now! When planning meals think what would work well for baby. My DH and I eat much healthier since having DC

I used jars and pouches most of the time. Easy and a great variety of tastes and textures. They both grew up eating well without being fussy over food. Highly recommend.

When I started weaning my baby at 6 months, he would eat basically nothing. No purée or mash of any consistency. None of the pancakes, bites, pieces of steamed vegetables, fruits, soups, porridge, breads, or any other lovingly-prepared morsel would pass his lips - or, on rare occasions, he'd take a microscopic nibble and then throw up. Meanwhile, he became more and more obsessed with boobs, to balance out the horrific idea that I might be proposing another source of nutrition.

This went on for two months.

What got him eating? Pouches. Pouches and melty puffs. Pouches because he could suck out the food, and melty puffs because they moved from solid to not-solid much more readily than anything I could make.

Which I appreciate half of Mumsnet would throw their hands up in horror about but, you know, it got him started and eased him in to eating, even nothing else did. And he does now eat perfectly sensible food (mostly), so all in all I can't really get worked up about it.

Ooh yes the melty puffs are good OP. They just dissolve like giant Wotsits.

@MrsMcTats

Agree with PP that at 6 months babies still get all their nutrients from milk. Therefore you are at the stage of teaching him to eat. So he needs to experience different textures and tastes. When starting to wean there is no expectation to actually eat anything- they're just learning what food is and how they deal with it. Gill Rapley is the blw guru and her book explains how to approach meal times and not to worry if everything ends up on the floor. That's normal. You will need to get used to adjusting family meals. I rarely cook with salt now for example, so we can all eat the same. As they get older I'll reintroduce, but I can live without it for now! When planning meals think what would work well for baby. My DH and I eat much healthier since having DC

Agree with this - most Ellas kitchen meals are heavily loaded with apple or pear on top of what they make out to be the main flavours so there isn't as much taste variety as you'd imagine. They are also heavily puréed in a way we could t recreate easily at home so aren't great for introducing textures of real food either. The high sugar (from fruit) content isn't ideal. Pureeing fruit breaks down the fibre and makes it cause blood sugar spikes in a way that whole fruit doesn't. (It's why juicing and smoothies for us aren't the health foods we think they are). At 6 months it doesn't matter that your child isn't actually eating the food you give. At the moment you want them to be exploring it, picking it up, putting it to their mouth to see how it tastes, feels and smells, how it sounds when they chuck it on the floor. It's so much easier just to throw them a handful of whatever you are having (mindful of salt content) and handful of pasta and a dollop of Bolognese (dont worry about the lumps( or some fish fillet, fingers of sweet potato and a broccoli floret and let them dig in (mostly with their hands at first)

My 3rd DC was a pain to wean and wouldn't eat any of my lovingly prepared Food. I was too busy to worry so just weaned him on the pouches till he got over it. He was eating normal food fine by 1ish. I wouldn't worry about it they are fine

@cocoloco987 - yes the pouch food for the first stage is very puréed but as you move through the stages the pouches and jar contain more solid foods. We rotated the different options each week and spoon fed them as I didn’t want to do blw.

It's still a totally different texture to anything you can create at home though.

I didn’t create my own baby food - used jars and pouches apart from when they were at nursery and they provided the food.

It's way to early to be making assumptions about anything- it takes them loads of goes to get the hang of eating anything, usually. We did a mix of mashed food and BLW. Just keep trying with all the normal food you eat, mashed or whole. You're supposed to start them off with just veg now, no fruit/sweeter tastes to begin with.
We've got Joe Wickes book too, it is useful for when they actually start eating rather than just putting in mouth and spitting out!

@cocoloco987 you must be looking at different Ella's kitchen pouches to the ones I used.

The fruit purées obviously contained fruit. The veg ones had a bit (and I mean 1%) of lemon juice but not tons of apple or other fruit.

Their savoury meals were the same.

Also as you move through the pouch stages they get lumper.

You combine these with things like toast and pieces of fruit etc to give other ways of eating.

@OP - wean how YOU want and you'll be fine. In the grand scheme of things it doesn't matter how you do it. They all go through a fussy phase at around 1 anyway.

Oh yes melty sticks are brilliant! Mine absolutely loved them for a while. Won't touch them now he's 2! (I finished off the packets we had in the cupboard.)