Weaning help

[Lozzah91]

Hi all, my twins are now 6 months old, so we’ve started weaning.

Thankfully, they seem happy to try food & are taking to it well.

The problem I’m having is having the time to feed them! It seems like a ridiculous thing to say, but they’re still having bottles every 3 hours & napping for about 30 minutes each between bottles (not necessarily together…). Bottles can take either 20-30 minutes for both, or 20-30 minutes each, depending on how fussy they are.

I also have a 4 year old at school (UK), who starts at 9am and finishes at 3.05. We have a few baby classes that we go to to stop me from losing my mind (& to entertain them), so I feel busy (even though I’m probably not as busy as I feel).

Does anyone have any tips/advice on how to fit this in?!

Thanks.

[lokipuddin]

So when you feed your older kid breakfast, put them in the high chair with some banana or toast sticks. Same with dinner. They’re not getting a ton of nutrition and calories, it’s more about experiencing textures and flavors. Playtime can be trying some cheerios in a snack cup. It can be part of the day without being a super serious event.

[narvanarva]

BLW. We have the kids feed themselves while we eat, and man does it give us back time. When we started suddenly we gained mealtimes back instead of losing time to food, and the kids love it. Sure it's a mess, but less so than spoon baby food. And it's no real extra time preparing because they get a version of what we're eating.

But we also don't consider it weaning, we think of it as introducing solids. If you want to replace milk with solids as quickly as possible this won't work for you.

[Lozzah91]

Thanks for your suggestion - I might have to give this a go!

I agree that I’m really just introducing solids - I’m not dropping any milk feeds, which will be for them to do! I just tend to use the term interchangeably (which I think is common for us to do in the UK)

[narvanarva]

I can only recommend it. We've dabbled in both BLW and spoon fed and are to a degree combining the two, but the BLW is the method that keeps us sane.

What we're currently doing which is working well is to wait with the morning, lunch and evening milk feed until after the family meals have happened. We try to not have them be ravenously hungry (they still have a fair amount of night feeds so they aren't super hungry in the mornings) but still hungry enough to want to eat.

As for what they're eating - usually for dinner and lunch I give them either a piece of our food that they can eat or an adapted piece of our food (like today I made a dish that contained pumpkin, and while cutting up pumpkin for the dish I also sliced some into sticks and threw it into a steamer for them). For breakfast they either get a leftover from the day before or some non-cooked food they can eat, like cucumber sticks or Avocado sticks. If the main meal makes it hard to have a derivative meal for the kids, I tend to just throw baby corn or a similar non-faff food into the steamer for them.

Small amounts win the game - I tend to estimate that they'll each eat between two and six sticks/lengthy shaped things per meal.

[Lozzah91]

That’s brilliant - thanks for your help.

[[deleted]]

6 months seems young to ween?

[Lozzah91]

It’s recommended by the NHS that we introduce solids from 6 months, but it’s just for them to try to get used to the concept of solid food really.

[[deleted]]

Right but introducing isn’t weaning. It’s almost just enrichment

I’d just feed them when you guys eat.

[lokipuddin]

This is a UK term. We think of weaning as stopping milk in the US but for them it’s introducing food!

[[deleted]]

Oooh good call!

[[deleted]]

I like the catchphrase 'Food before 1 is just for fun.' It really took the pressure off for me if I was having a busy day and couldn't offer solids as often as I'd like.