17 weeks weaning

[bruhaha]

Is 17 weeks to young to wean? My ds is 17 weeks corrected age as he was born 2 months prem. HV says it is fine. He constantly sucks and chews on his hands even after a 45 mins bfeed, he's waking up in the night again and never seems satisfied.

Scared that i might be rushing him - although he seems ready.

Sounds like time to me. You know ds better than anyone, hv only goes off text book! ds1 now 14, weaned at 12 weeks as that was the time then. dd1 now 8, time suddenly changed to 16 weeks although i weaned her also at 12 weeks. dd2 now 4 was weaned at 11 weeks and finally ds2 at 10 weeks.
By weaned i mean giving small amount of baby rice not 3 meals a day! ds1 had baby rice for weeks before progressing to anything else whereas dd1 was on 3 meals a day within weeks. All babies are different, just go with the flow and what you feel your baby needs.

theres a big growth spurt at that age so they start waking again. As you are bf the only way they can tell you they are hungry and want more is to feed more. I started feeding my first for those reasons at that age but he did not sleep through again till over 6 months. He was stuffed full of fruit veg and baby rice but as they have less calories than milk he was feeding even more at night.

If you can ride out the growth spurt you may find he starts to sleep through again and you won't have to faff around feeding him solids for the next 2 months.

I thinks chewing an sucking hands is developmental.

i tend to disagree. Obviously they need more feeding during a growth spurt but they also need the extra calories solids bring. They get to an age/stage where milk just doesn't feed them enough any more.

Weaning is no guarantee they'll sleep through - mine was fine until she weaned. Agree with msappropriate - it is classic growth spurt time, and if you can ride it out it saves a lot of faff.

How is it faff getting babies onto solids?

For what it's worth, and clearly just anecdotal, my dd was fine on breastmilk alone (sticking to 99th centile like a limpet) until 6 months. She did all the chewing hands/mammoth growth spurt stuff too.

but when you bf the extras solids have an impact on your supply. Your breasts produce less becasue they are getting some calories from elsewhere. Fruit and veg and rice are the foods you eat when on a diet and are not jammed full of calories like bm or formula. If you were ff the solids would bring extra calories but is doesn't work that way with breast feeding.

Oh, all the pureeing, spoon feeding blah blah. I was lazy and did BLW at 6 months - get to eat hot meals that way!

I ff mine so maybe it is different. But i know lots who bf and weaned at the same time as me with fine results. I don't think solids are a way to make them sleep, just to satisfy their hunger and to progress them to the next stage.

its a faff cos you either have to cook and puree or buy jars or baby rice. When you go out for the day you have to think about where and when you are going to feed them . and you have to take the food with you and clean them up after and some people also sterilise all the stuff at that age. and its more washing up too. As opposed to doing nothing at all.

Also some babies sre not really keen at that age.

My first son was weaned early and his weight dropped from 98th to 50th. (went back up again when he was on the full range of food at 6 months) My second was not weaned till 26 wks and stayed on the 98th percentile line .

bruhaha - do you want to wean him now or do you feel you ought to? Was it the HV's suggestion to get him to sleep through?

The current guidelines which your HV should have explained to you in full is that 17 weeks is the absolute very earliest a baby should be weaned but that are better off on milk alone until around 6 months.

chewing on his hands and waking in the night are not necessarily signs he needs to be weaned. Do you feel he's ready?

It's funny how times change/government guidelines change. I'd never even heard of blw til recently on mn. After reading about it i just can't imagine feeding any of mine that way, they were all just ready for solids so much earlier. I also never found weaning a faff or forced or anything. Each to their own really but hv talk as though everyone should be doing the exact same thing.

These are some signs that are different from the ones hv trot out

www.kellymom.com/nutrition/solids/solids-when.html

17 Weeks is a classic growth spurt stage.

The recommended age for weaning is 26 weeks, not 17.

Your milk is the best thing your DC could be having at the moment and solid food will make no difference towards sleep, in fact at 17 weeks digesting solid food will probably keep him up.

Somebody more knowledgeable will be along soon

my first son loved early solids but then I could have given him angel delight and he may have loved that too. I hadn't realised that brands like boots sell baby food aimed at 4-6 months that have wheat, meat and gluten in them which have been a no no befreo 6 months for a long time.

sorry, just read the op properly (hard to concentrate when the baby is throwing pasta spirals at me) your ds is 17 weeks adjusted age so about 25 weeks.

was just beaten to posting that kellymom list . It really is only you who can judge whether he's ready or not, is he developmentally more like the six month old he nearly is or the four month old he should have been?

thanks all - this is the first chance i've had to get back on as been with with wee one.

he is 25 weeks old but 17 corrected because of the prem. I'm not wanting to start him onto solids just because he isn't sleeping - the hand chewing makes him look like he's starving and as soon as i finish feeding him he starts knawing, even after a 45 min feed - he puts them so far in his mouth he gags!

I keep saying to my husband that i'll start him tomorrow then tomorrow comes and i find an excuse not to start. I am excited to start weaning i've got the books, steamer and food processor already but don't want to rush.

Can delaying weaning effect there growth developmentally? Or is that just between the pureed stage and lumpy stage of feeding?

i'm off to read the kellymom page

Ooh - didn't register the prem bit properly. Tinkerbelle is your woman for this. I'll see if she's about.

best thing would be to put some soft ooked veg or soft ripe fruit in front of him and see if he can manage to pick it up and taste it. no need for food processing and all that jazz. do blw and he'll show you when he's ready, no guess work involved. you'll be able to see if he's developmentally ready for food rather than by passing things with a spoon of puree or baby rice.

you don't have to do purees at all and beofore the rise of baby food manufacturers weaning did not start until the babies were 8-9 months. Milk should be their main source of nutrition for many months whenever you start weaning.

babyledweaning.blogware.com/

Many babies start with purees and then get stuck on them and hate lumpy food/finger food (another reason that its easier to miss out that stage). I remember reading that if they don't do much chewing their speech can be delayed, but I think it would be extreme cases.

Hello, not read any other posts, may post again later.

All babies follow their own pattern, for term babies it's fairly close, but for premature babies it can be massively different. Some will be like Tink and do everything as though they were a term baby, some will do what they should have been doing if it wasn't for that little hiccup where they were born and some will do something in between.

That said 17 weeks or 23 weeks is probably a little too early really. There has been a study that has shown premature babies stomachs take longer to mature, even with CGA, than term babies so the longer you can hold off the better.

At around 17 weeks babies will go through a growth spurt and it sounds like this is what you are going through at the moment. At a growth spurt babies will guzzle and guzzle, day and night (but especially at night because that's when mum makes the best milk) to a. tank up for the growth spurt and b. make sure mum is able to cope with the big baby that she is about to have. It's also possible with the chewing that a tooth is due, I noticed that she was teething at 3 months (from birth) and she didn't have a tooth until she was 7 months.

Before a year food is for fun and experience, there is a little nutrition to be gained from it but not as much, especially calories, as in milk. If you think about your own diets, you give up full fat milk, not carrots. The same works in reverse. If your baby is hungry then give it the full fat stuff!

Right, Tink was a 31 weeker and we waited until 6 months actual age, although I wish I had waited longer she actually did really well, she was BLW so she wasn't pushed past what she could do. I think that BLW is the best way to gauge when a baby is ready, if they can't do it they're not ready.

25 sorry, I meant for premature babies also as I would try to leave them as long as possible.

and I forgot to say that I weaned Tink due to bad advice from my paediatrition, but I didn't know better then.

My dd was weaned at 15 weeks on HV advice.She was taking 6 x 8ox feeds a day and wanting more.I started off very slowly on rice,pureed veg and fruit and she loved it.Shes 4 now ,happy and heatky and loves her food and will try anything.

My ds is 12 weeks old and is nothing like her.Hes on 5oz feeds six times a day and seems happy with that.He is not as hungry as she was so I know he will be weaned till much later on.Its funny though that his weight chart (although is set slightly higher for a boy) looks exactly like hers did at same age.

I think every baby is different and you have to play it by ear.

Ideas don't change for the sake of it, there is a reason why they change, not just to keep HVs on their toes and to confuse second time mums!

This is taken from netmums:

The guidelines for weaning changed to 6 months several years ago (not recently, last year etc as some people have been stating). As with all these guidelines there is a lot of research and science etc behind them yet all the accompanying research etc and so reasoning behind it isn't given out to everyone automatically. - but it is available, and it is given to the medical professionals as a matter of course (some don't read it, don't take notice of it etc but it is given to them). The actual results of the research and so the reasoning behind the recomendations have always said babies will be ready for weaning between 4 and 6 months BUT (huge but . . .) there is an actual physical change in their digestive system which makes it capable of digesting solid foods. Before this change has taken place solid foods can not easily or safely be digested and so if solids are given before it happens then the baby is open to problems (many of which appear only much later in life not in baby hood). This physical change occurs at some point after 4 months but before 6 months - and there is no way of telling when it happens in any baby. So because we can not look inside our babies and see if it has occurred yet, but it is known that it will have occurred by 6 months old and that all a baby actually needs nutrionally for the first 6 months is milk, the line was drawn at 6 months and the advice put out as do not wean before 6 months without medical advice and guidance as if weaning is done before 6 months old there is a real risk that this physical change has not yet occurred.

Many of the long held signs of readiness for weaning are now known not to be true indicators of a need to wean at all as well, there are more important indicators than showing an interest in food, seemingly being hungry (food actually provides less calorific content and nutrional value than milk), etc..

Health visitors doctors etc are all meant to be trained to understand this, however the very fact that some of them give out advce that not only goes against it but is downright wrong (there are still hvs out there who will say to wean at 4 weeks old!), frequently based on their own experiences and opinions rather than medical research and fact, myths continue to be perpetuated and the true recomendations aren't getting out there properly. For instance many a hv who will tell you to wait until 6 months wont actually tell you why, or even be able to, they wont know that the actual reports do include that for some babies 4 months is okay or why this is so, and ask them how you are suppossed to tell if this physical change has occurred in your child yet and they are likely to stare at you blankly (the actual answer of course being you cant tell, hence should wait till 6 months because it will have by then, but let's see what your baby is really like and go through all the indicators, the real ones not the generations-handed-down ones and see if maybe we should consider trying some solids now if we decide that these indicators are stronger than the chance of the babies gut not being ready yet and then help mum work out whether it would be right to go ahead or not).