Fussy Eater (BLW)

[liamsdaddy]

Our DS is almost 10 months now. He could sit at 6 months and was showing considerable food envy so we started him on solids. First porridge, then slowly adding various meals including homemade vegetable purees.

Recently DS has been rejecting spoon feeding on some foods. As a general rule he will allow 2 or 3 spoons of homemade vegetable puree/lumpy puree before rejecting. He will allow homemade fruit puree or yogurt (biiig wide open mouth for those) and will allow (most annoyingly) the HIPP organics jars (well the ones with pasta in any case).

We assumed that maybe he didn't like the consistency of the homemade veg's or wanted rice/pasta mixed in with it - but this only worked for a little while.

Now, he is pretty much finger feeding himself, toast, cheese on toast, bits of softened vegetable, etc. But we still can't get a spoon in! He even rejected the homemade (baby safe) lasagna we made (when he will happily eat the HIPP jar lasagna!!)

Going down the all finger food route is a good thing IMO, it means he is closer to eating the sort of food we eat. However, we are having trouble with keeping some variance and getting some protein into him.

Unfortunately the mumsnet recipe section isn't easily searchable for "finger food" and "freezable".

So any ideas for finger foods that don't take ages to prepare and can be freezable/reheat-able (so we can batch prepare)?

Why wont he eat our lasagna, but will eat HIPP? (OK, I don't expect anyone to know the real reason, but it's annoying as anything). Or has he just got expensive tastes?

If you find out the answer to why they'll eat those bloody HIPP things let me know.
My food is so much better!

What about pasta that he can pick up, like twirls or something?? Or omelette strips?

My DS won't eat these either, or toast or finger feeding veggies, and he is 13 months now. He's a little bugger!

If you visit www.babyledweaning.co.uk there are loads of recipes.

The easiest thing to do is to just not cook your food with salt and share it with him. At 10 months you can give him strips of meat, pasta shells with bolognaise sauce - anything really - it can be messy, but fingers are v adaptable

The jars thing is that they taste very sweet due to the caramelising that happens as they are superheated

The thing is, all food is finger food really (except ,maybe, yoghurt)- it's just that some is easier to pick up than others.
So if you start to think of ways to make the normal meals that you eat easier to handle, you don't need special finger food recipes IYSWIM.
For example- fusilli pasta is easiest to pick up, so that's all we eat nowadays.
Baked potato can have a filling mashed into it then cut into wedges with the skin on
Spanish omelette/frittata type things are a good way of getting protein and a lot of veg in (or they would be if DS would eat eggs!)
Serve rice with something sticky like daal so it can be picked up in handfuls.
Soak pieces of bread in soup- and maybe stir in some grated cheese or yoghurt as well.
Mashed potato cakes freeze well and can have tinned salmon, cheese cubes, peas or other veg in.
Quesadillas (ie tortillas filled with everything you can think of, folded in half and dry fried) are quite easy to pick up and always go down well here.

Sorry, some of these aren't very freezable, but if you all eat roughly the same things, even if not at the same time, then your DS can have his earlier, or the next day, rather than making something different altogether.

Hope some of this helps- we went down the BLW route and are going to do it again when it comes to weaning DC2, so would definitely recommend it.

In our house, lasagne is finger food!

Dd2 is now 15mo but has never let me spoon-feed her. She used to be happy to have her spoon loaded for her though, so maybe that's worth a try? I also find that she is sometimes happy to take food from my fork. I think she is just very resistant to the idea that she be treated differently from anyone else.