My first post in weaning.... dd will be 22 weeks tomorrow...

[Picante]

I really wanted to wait til 6 months.

She was a big baby at birth but is now average for weight (although still long).

She just seems miserable at the moment and doesn't enjoy milk feeds (is bf). She has hawk eyes on anything I'm eating.

Help me make it to 26 weeks. Please. I'm so tired - I guess I just think weaning will settle her a bit more and help her sleep.

Am planning to do blw. Dh and ds have allergies which gives me even more reason to wait it out.

I wrote this post a week ago!
Weaning doesnt often settle, and you have come this far another few weeks is nothing.
She has the rest of her life to eat!

As I said on FB, do the banana test:

?A good test is the banana challenge - if your baby is able to sit up and hold its head steady, reach out and grab half a peeled, ripe banana and eat some of it all by themselves, they are ready."

You might remember your DN slept a lot worse just after weaning began! ;)

agree with mrsjamin!

the whole 'looking at everything you are eating' thing confuses me. Surely they are interested in EVERYTHING at that age? the mumsnet website itself says if they were looking intently on someone smoking a ciggie, we wouldnt conclude they were ready to smoke, would we? hang in there for another few weeks, it really will be worth it. bananas are terribly constipating for some babies, btw.....

nowwearefour... i used to think that too, and for a while it certainly was true

but ds3 definitely reached a point where it was FOOD he was looking at.

an example:

he was on the floor in front of me. i was holding a piece of toast.
his eyes did not leave it. i started moving it from side to side and he never took his eyes off of it.
i then slowly put it down and picked something else up.
he watched it for oooh, 4 seconds? lol
i then picked the toast back up and mr hawk-eyes was back on it again!

he then started crying until I bf him

i think that in some ways you should think of it as LLL describe- that they're ready for solids around the middle of the first year

the evidence for not weaning early is fairly conclusive in younger babies, but once you reach 5/5.5 months it varies more.
some babies are ready earlier than 6 months (i mean, it isn't like a switch suddenly flips one day) and some aren't. but by 6 months pretty much all are, which is why the guidelines are 6 months, because there is no real way of telling if the gut has sufficiently matured

this is where BLW is good, because it goes on the premise that the gut matures in randem with a babies ability to grasp, chew and swallow food.
if this is true then the baby that can sit up, pick up food by itself (not handed to it), bite a piece off, chew it and swallow it is probably fine to eat!

but also, agree that it doesn't necessarily help settle them. certainly didn't for ds2 or ds3, and they both massively increased BF for a week or 2 after starting solids as well

Thanks all. Might wait a couple of weeks then try a banana. She's not stable sitting with support yet.