My son is steadily putting on weight and has recently moved from being between 25th and 50th centile, to right on the 50th centile. He is exclusively breastfed.
Over the past few weeks he has become a very distractible daytime feeder (too busy looking around, making noises and especially chewing fingers though not sure if this is teething or not). This has coincided with being much more wakeful at night. On average he's waking every 2 hours - just starts thrashing about and I usually feed him and put him back before he wakes properly. Sometimes, if it hasn't been long since the last feed, I ignore it and he goes back to sleep. I understand that this behaviour is pretty common for his age.
MIL keeps saying 'have you thought about starting him on solids to help him sleep through the night?'. DP's colleague apparently told him his night waking meant that "he wants food" . HV said 'you do know that he's old enough to be started on solids now?'. etc etc.
I think he's teething, as although a happy soul generally, he currently goes though quite cranky periods during the day - moaning and grizzling, constantly pressing his gums, gumming down hard on anything he can. For some reason people are reluctant to believe that this might be the case.
I don't get the impression he's going hungry. I think he's just feeding more at night as he's taking less during the day. And I don't want to start weaning just to give myself a better night's sleep. I want to do it at the right time for him. I can cope with the tiredness pretty well.
But am beginning to think I might as well let him try some rice once he hits 5 months (1 weeks time) in case he takes to it really well and it turns out he was hungry after all.
Any thoughts?