Anyone who weaned/is weaning early and wants to talk about it without getting their head bit off step this way

[RagingHormone]

Feel free to chat until your heart's content without being judged on this thread.

What made you decide to wean early? (My baby had awful reflux so I had to, and he was ready for it anyway).

What sort of things did/do you feed your baby at 6 months?

Neenz- I slowly reduced DS's milk to one pint a day (one bottle in the morning, and one at night). To do this, i added an extra meal into the day, so he has his bottle and cereal for breakfast, then a fruit pot/ baby custard, then a little bit later a fruit pot or something savory, then for tea he has a proper tea like shepherd's pie or whatever. He doesn't have bottles through the night now either. So it's working great!

Flourybaps...its Babycentre

SurburbanDryad, it's not a downer on me that your LO didn't anything till 8 months. If mine can't do finger food till 8 months then they'll just have to have purees (so shoot me).

Ahh....sorry, thought you were BLWing. My mistake.

Just read your post properly.

I am in awe of you ex-bfing your twins for 22 weeks! Amazing!

Absolutely - ditto suburban. Respect.

Makes my nips twinge just thinking about it!!

Thanks, I appreciate that, Gabster and Surburban. I feel very proud of my BFing, but these weaning threads I'm afraid are making me feel like I am doing something wrong and can't ask for advice cos I weaned before six months and am not doing blw. I feel like if I ask a question about purees all I'd get 'let them feed themselves - it's easy', when I don't find that it is easy.

I love the idea of blw, but I just can't see how my babies will get enough inside them for them to thrive. They have already almost dropped off the bottom of the growth chart (which never bothered me cos they were always gaining, just slowly) and I always said 'once they hit six months and have food they will pile it on'. Not if I BLW cos they won't pick anything up (yet).

There are many nutritionists (I have a book by Susannah Lawson) who write about what to give babies and they talk about giving food with iron in. If you are BLWing, how do you make sure that happens? Can someone please do a link to all this evidence about milk being all they need till they are one?

Also I know the argument about how solids are not linked to sleeping through, in fact my DD slept through from 13 weeks but since starting solids wakes almost every night , but babies do wake cos if hunger, so if they do not eat enough then surely they will be hungry. But do BLWers just get up in the night to BF if necessary (very noble but I had enough of being up all night when the DTs were newborns thanks!).

Neenz, it sounds as though you are doing a great job.

With DS2 due to him being so underweight we had to follow a high calorie diet and I'm sat here trying to think how you could do that with BLW, and I can't think of anything I'm afraid. Hopefully someone with more knowledge of BLW will be able to point you in the right direction.

We used double cream in porridge and things like that to just get as many calories as possible in one meal.

By the way, your babies are totally adorable and I love their names.

Neenz, ds had lots of catching up to do and he did at around 6 months eat the most unbelievable amount. We just gave him whatever he wanted. By then he was on finger foods and was eating a whole avocado a day, plus a banana plus anything he managed to feed himself of a main meal (pasta with lamb bolognaise was his favourite).

Neenz

Please just do what works for your babies. BLW is great when it works but I found that even with a baby with no weight issues (exactly 50th percentile since birth) I ended up doing a mix of spoon feeding and finger foods.

I found that my son's desire to eat was higher than his ability to feed himself, so I helped him. If he was really hungry I'd spoon-feed him at the beginning of the meal (or load up the spoon and give it to him depending on his mood) and then give him finger food at the end. If he's not in the mood for being spoon-fed then I'll put finger food in front of him and help him eat intermittently throughout the meal.

There is no way of feeding babies that will work for everyone.

Fingers of toast with full fat cream cheese have always been a hit with my son (and nice and calorie-rich!!)

Thanks Nellie, that sounds sensible!

ib, that seems such a small amount! Does he sleep through the night?

RH, how old is your LO? I don't really want to cut down on milk feeds cos aren't they supposed to drink as much milk as before? They are on three meals a day and 5/6 breastfeeds.

No response came the loud reply. You should really be careful what you say because you don't ever know who you are saying it to. Not even an apology then?

Neenz, I'll send Scorpio over to tell you what she is feeding her DD, she is doing a combination of BLW and spoon feeding things like yoghurt and porridge, her DD has gone up a centile. TBH though the best way to get a baby to increase their weight is more milk (unless they have an allergy or intolerance) so maybe you could add in extra feeds? Possibly formula if you'd find it too hard to add more bm in!

Oh, also, I think I mentioned earlier, high fat that DS loves is avocado mixed with cream cheese, it's then put on cucumber slices and he kind of licks it off, eating the cucumber last (or throwing it on the floor)

Neenz, actually he managed to get quite a lot of food in! When he was 8 months I remember his 3yo and 14 mo cousins came to visit and he was eating more than them! He was flying up the centiles too.

He was also bfing 6-7 times a day. He certainly wasn't sleeping through the night though!

tinkerbellesmum - was that aimed at me?

Neenz, I think it was wrt

By jamandjeruselum on Sun 02-Nov-08 22:35:27
TinkerBellesMum
"I've been on babycentre, Bounty, BabyExpert, ivillage, BabyFit, KellyMom"
You really need to get out more!!

By TinkerBellesMum on Sun 02-Nov-08 22:37:07
Well that's over the space of 11 years and considering I'm housebound... well, let's just say I would love to!

No Neenztwinz, VS got it right.

a message for neenztwinz. I remember my breastfed twins were really quite enthusiastic about weaning and I did wean them earlier than you (seven years ago). I wonder whether they were not quite as full to the brim with milk as I would have liked them to be. My little girl had reflux like a lot of babies on this thread. I did meet a bfding mother of twins who even then in 2002 didn't really introduce food till they were 5-6 months, but she was amazingly calm about round the clock feeding to meet their demands. I would have given up breastfeeding in despair if I hadn't been encourage to try some baby rice and apple puree etc ala annabel. As it was having that backup helped me continue breastfeeding until they were two years. And that was fantastic for all of us. I don't what the moral is. Should I have waited, given bottles of top-up formula when I felt so unhappy about failing to meet their needs, stopped breastfeeding or just devoted myself to feeding constantly. I had an older toddler and as I say a baby screaming with reflux. I didn't have to make a choice because in those days 18-20 weeks was considered a normal time to wean. P.S. I put formula in their babyrice. Perhaps that was a good compromise. All the food I gave them seemed v. milky. My twins are healthy. One is a milk addict to this day, the other hates the stuff and much prefers raw cauliflower. They are 6 years old though.

we weaned at 16weeks as baby kept waking up in night after sleeping through for 8 weeks since she was 8 weeks old

wee tried to increase her milk during the day but there is only so much milk you can get a 4mth to drink

the HV wasnt impressed - and if i was a first time mum or didnt know what i was doing as a nanny, i prob would have gone home, thought myself a TERRIBLE mum and cried with what she said to me

how wrong i was, could damage their digestive system etc

since being a nanny for 17years the weaning times have changed so much - it was 4mths then 6mths, then back to 4mths, now back to 6mth

you know your own baby, and if waking up/hungary then offer baby rice, then puree veg etc

That's not quite how the weaning ages have changed! They've pretty much been the same since the 70's.