By Harry Loney.
There comes a time, in every man and woman’s life, where they must drag themselves off the teat and onto some meat. Or vegetables if you must, but that doesn’t rhyme so good. Does anything rhyme with vegetables? Maybe legibles? Look, you’re missing the point. Stay focussed. This blog is about how to wean a baby onto solids and not lose your mind in the process.
Finding the right baby food is, of course, important. But we discovered some extra baby hacks that are just as vital. They helped us to get our eldest eating food and taking his eye off the boobies (for now)
Eating together
This was the simplest way we found of encouraging the boy to eat solids. It’s a monkey-see monkey-do situation. We made sure to eat at the same time he did, even if this meant eating really early and then having to have something light ourselves later to keep our bellies from rumbling.
By making lots of happy eating noises and saying “mmmmmm” after each mouthful (which started to get weird after a while) he also began eating happily, if only so he could say “mmmmmmm” too! Copying is how they learn, and he learned this quickly.
Little and often
Kids this age like to munch throughout the day, so by making sure we always had some easy snack for him to chow down on, we resisted the temptation to stick a bottle in his hands and be done with it. Bits of soft, buttery toast were good, and bananas are absolute winners when it comes to this. Once he learned to hold one himself we were laughing. A self-feeding replicant? Brilliant.
Encourage eating
At this age, babies are desperate to know if what they are doing meets your approval or not. So applauding the good things (often literally) and giving them lots of attention is a great way to keep them doing it. Hopefully, they’ll do it the next time too, and there you have a great habit they have gotten into.
Have you got tips on encouraging weaning? Our youngest is still on milk, so any tips on how to wean a baby onto solids for this one will be gratefully received. I’m always happy to try out new ways! Let us know in the comments.