I have been reading the other post about a lady with a one year old who has weaning problems - my case is a bit different so I thought I would post separately to see if anyone can help.
DD started weaning at 6 months - not really interested in solids at that stage but started her as HV said we had to. She get the hang eventually and continued to gain weight well until around Jan. However she has had bronchiolitis and basically been under the weather since then and only just getting fully back to normal. She has been very reluctant with food during the really bad bits so we have just continued to feed her things we know she likes just to get something into her IYKWIM. We went for check yesterday and she is now at 25th centile having been 50th since birth until Jan. She has 4 teeth with 2 more starting to come through at the top.
She is at nursery 4 days a week and eats well there, they spoon feed breakfast and lunch as far as I am aware and give little Organix snacks in the afternoon which she will take so she will take finger food of some sort. She has her tea at home.
However we are having a lot of difficulty at home getting her onto stage 3 foods with lumps in or taking finger food at home. She will take maybe a couple of mouthfuls of the stage 3 foods and then wail inconsolably and refuse to eat them. She sometimes gags on the lumps which makes her very upset and again she refuses to eat more.
We offer toast in the morning with her breakfast but she just bangs two pieces of toast together like she does with toy bricks or stacking cups and doesn't eat them. Even if we sit and eat with her. She will only eat yogurt and fruit puree for breakfast, refuses weetabix or porridge.
I found nice soft piece of pear to offer her at lunchtime today - I ate a piece too and tempted her by putting her piece of pear to her lips so she could taste it and see it was food not a toy(she loves pear compote). She happily bit into the pear, made a token attempt to chew with her teeth and then swallowed and choked and threw up the morsel of pear and all the food she had had before the pear. Floods and floods of hysterical tears and even looking at the pear left on the side upset her.
At the moment the only surefire way of getting food into her is to offer her stage 2 Ella's foods (she loves those) or slightly lumpy homemade fruit purees. She will eat a wide variety of tastes as long as the texture is not too lumpy but won't eat vast amounts even then. HV is concerned she has dropped to 25th centile and said she needs to start putting weight on.
She is cow's milk allergic so what we can feed her is somewhat limited and it makes it hard to give her what we are having. We only have breakfast with her, if anything, as we keep the timing of her meals to the same times as the nursery as we don't want to upset the rhythm of her day too much. I can't face lunch at 11am or dinner at 5.30.
She is on 3 milk feeds a day at 7am, 2.30pm and 6.30pm so it's not like she might be being put off solids by having lots of milk feeds.
Basically I suppose what I am saying is - have any of you had this problem and found a good way to get your child to accept lumps and finger foods. I don't feel that I can just offer finger foods and no stage 2 foods or fruit compotes as she simply can't seem to cope with the finger/lumpy stuff and I don't want her losing more weight.
I was made to feel like a very poor mother by HV for DD's drop from 50th to 25th centile, in addition I got a slap on the wrist for DD not holding her bottle of milk to feed herself. She doesn't seem to want to try and spoon feed herself either which was another black mark, any ideas for encouraging this too?
Many thanks, DD's choking/vomiting this lunchtime has really upset me, I feel on the verge of tears and like I have failed my daughter somehow by not having got her better able to cope with lumps/finger foods but I have just been doing my best to make sure at least she was eating something whilst she was not well, which was a horribly stressful time in itself.
Cheers