At the beginning of weaning I found it a big black hole of openness, even at 7 months I feel like I'm just winging it. I had absolutely no clue where to start, I was unsure of allergies, portion size, which meal of the day to start with, what times of the day she should eat what, what fruit and vegetables to start with and how it would even naturally progress from purees to textures. I'm no expert not even in the slightest but what we're doing works for us.
I researched as best as I could I listened to wean in 15s podcast by Joe Wicks and bought his recipe book alongside that of Ellas Kitchen - I also found it useful to follow a few weaning instagrams - there's plenty out there!
I started weaning Emilia at 4 months I started a couple of days with some baby rice around tea time - 4/5pm then I found this didnt work for me so I moved this to every morning where I decided I would feed her her breakfast 1 hour approx after her last bottle. For example if her bottle was at 5am and she woke at 8am I would give her a bottle and then her breakfast at 9am or if she had a bottle at 7am I would feed her her breakfast at 8am. I didnt want her to feel too full if I combined the two I found she took more to the meal if it was spaced out - I even do this with lunch and dinner if she does happen to have a bottle around that time although now at 7 months this is more rare.
I started with porridge and baby rice suitable for her age and I got her used to this for a week or two before moving onto another meal. I then moved to the weaning approach for lunch where she would try a plain vegetable every day - each day different for two weeks. Most of the research I did recommended starting with bland vegetables first rather than going straight for sweeter vegetable or fruit which she most definitely would like. I started with brocolli which looking back was a fail, it didn't go well and I think if I went for something more like avocado it would have been better. From this she quickly grew to love avocado and sweetcorn specifically. After about two weeks of introducing lunch with single flavours I moved onto combined and at the same time introduced dinner.
The timing of both meals I struggled to get into a rhythm with for a while. At the moment she usually has breakfast 8-9am (baby rice or porridge), lunch between 1230-2pm, tea time snack between 4-5pm (fruit or something with milk depending if shes had enough milk that day) and dinner at 645-7pm.
Emilia has been really good and seems to like everything I've given her, now at 7 months I've started introducing chicken, lamb, rice, white fish, salmon and tuna. Hopefully other the next month or so I will be bringing in more finger foods so she can do more baby led weaning. So far she's only had tea time finger foods. Before weaning I imagined at 6 months I would have started the baby led weaning finger foods but her weaning journey has naturally got us to this stage which is fine - I would rather go at her pace than the pace recommend by a book.
Until next time,
All our love
Baby C and Me X
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