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| Maria |
My
baby, Maria, is now eight months old and I’ve been weaning for around three
months (yes, I started before the recommended six months!). I approached
weaning with a mixture of excitement, nervousness and confusion! Excited about moving onto the next stage and
seeing how Maria would take to new foods. Nervous and confused about how to go
about it and when! It felt like I was bombarded with information about feeding
my newborn baby but, when it came to weaning, I was thrown into the deep end!
Different people gave different advice about whether or not I should wait until
Maria was six months old. And I wasn’t really sure how many times I should give
solids each day, how much to give and how this all fitted in with milk feeds!!
Wanting
to do the best thing for my baby, I had planned to follow official advice and start
weaning at six months after exclusively breastfeeding until then. This was much
to the horror of my parents: “Well so and so started giving baby rice at four
months and they’re ok and solids will help Maria sleep (they didn’t!!), and in
the old days there was none of this advice.....etc, etc!!”
It was
at the advice of my doctor that I started weaning at around five months (well,
he is a health professional after all!!). I can’t remember why he suggested it,
perhaps because Maria wasn’t sleeping well. I started by mixing some formula
milk with baby rice once a day (I had, again, planned to do the dutiful thing
and use expressed milk but it was becoming increasingly difficult to find the
time to express and, when I did give it a go, I got little more than a
teaspoon-full)! Maria seemed more than ready for it – she excitedly gulped it
all down – but this didn’t improve her sleeping. In fact, it got worse and, as
time went on, it became clear that she had a cow’s milk allergy.
The
allergy materialised as dreadful eczema all over Maria’s body. She’d had eczema
before but it started to get out of control and she became increasingly
distressed with it. She was also doing up to 10 dirty nappies a day and I think
she became terribly dehydrated. She also stopped putting weight on. At first, I
didn’t link the eczema with the cow’s milk. But one morning I gave her some
baby porridge, which contained skimmed milk powder, and she reacted within
minutes. Where she got some on her hand, it came up like a nettle rash – bright
red with white spots. Just to be completely sure, I gave her a Petit Filous a
couple of weeks later and she got the same reaction on her hand.
I took
Maria to the doctor and he prescribed some lactose-free SMA in case I ever
needed to use formula. Before giving her any, I decided to do a patch-test on
her hand and she got the nettle-like reaction again, so I’m sure it’s the cow’s
milk protein that she’s allergic to. Apparently, around 2 to 3 per cent of
babies have such an allergy – so, very low – and most eventually outgrow it.
And I
very much hope so. As I’m breast feeding, this means that I’ve had to cut all
dairy products from my diet. As you can imagine, this is absolutely no fun at
all! And a childhood without cake, chocolate, ice cream, etc. would be pretty
wretched, so I will keep trying the milk every now and again and hope that the
allergy goes away! For now, I use Kara coconut milk at breakfast time with porridge.
Opinion was mixed on whether or not I could use infant soya milk, which I did
for a couple of weeks. My doctor said it was fine but my health visitor was
cautious on the use of this before age two (yet more weaning confusion!). So
I’ve erred on the side of caution and stopped using it, even if it was only 3oz
a day at breakfast.
Other
than the allergy side of things, weaning has mostly been an enjoyable
experience, although some days she’ll eat well and other days she won’t, for no
discernible reason! When Maria was six months old, I moved onto three ‘solid’
meals a day. I use the term ‘solid’ in the loosest sense, as most of the food
she’s had has been purees. Most things have gone down well – chicken casserole
and most fruits and vegetables. Maria has turned her nose up at a few things:
·
Salmon – I pureed up two fillets with potato,
broccoli and tomato, and she didn’t like it! Note to self – don’t make such
large quantities in future!!! Eating baby food myself so that I don’t waste it
isn’t my favourite sort of lunch! And it’s so frustrating when you spend ages
making something and they don’t like it!
·
Liver!!! No surprise there, then! My mum made a
massive batch of liver casserole, convinced that this was the BEST way for
Maria to get iron into her diet. Perhaps it would be if she’d actually eat it!
And I’m not sure I can face eating that one myself. So it’s currently taking up
lots of much-needed space in my freezer!
·
Swede – again, don’t puree up a WHOLE vegetable
before trying it out first in future!
·
Banana – another allergy! When I tried this, Maria
got the nettle-like reaction under her chin and round her neck within minutes,
which is a shame as this would make a great finger food and mixes well with
other foods.
Frustratingly,
the jars of food from the supermarket have often gone down better than the food
I’ve painstakingly made myself – I hope that doesn’t say anything about my
cooking!
Alongside
purees, I’ve also been offering finger foods. It’s taken a long time for Maria
to put any of these in her mouth. I think I missed a window of opportunity
here. There was a time when everything would go in Maria’s mouth but she seemed
to stop toy-licking just before I tried to give her proper food!
One
good thing about weaning is that it’s helped to give us more of a routine to
our day. I don’t feel like I had much of a routine before six months! I now do
a milk feed when we get up in the morning followed by breakfast, a milk feed
after Maria’s morning nap, lunch at 12, a milk feed after Maria’s afternoon
nap, tea at five then a milk feed before bed. I still worry about whether or
not she’s getting enough milk. Some days, it feels like she hasn’t had much at
all as looking around, grabbing my nose and yanking at my nipple are much more
fun than feeding! But she’s not really demanding any more than she’s getting so
I just have to hope it’s enough!
And finally,
it’s been a messy old business! It’s been a bit of a challenge to put up with
food flying everywhere! But I guess it’s all good preparation for when Maria
starts chucking paint around and drawing on the walls!
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