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3 Guaranteed Ways To Successful Weaning

3 Guaranteed Ways To Successful Weaning 


Ha! Gotcha! There are none. Sorry to disappoint you but really I cannot stress how true the adage “each child is different “ holds here. My older child took to solids more easily, rejected purées and wasn’t very accepting of sweetish vegetables. Alright I thought to myself as I geared up to weaning baby no. 2. this should be  a walk in the park. How wrong I was! I can perhaps best describe what I went through as climbing a steep hilly terrain. With slippers. Actually make that without footwear. Yes, the struggle is real. 


Baby no.2 showed interest in food but played with my emotions by either spitting it out or gagging. Doesn’t matter what or how.  It was a crazy couple of months. Add to this the demands of a fussy toddler- I was in for a joy ride. 


So instead of giving you any guarantees to successful weaning because there are no guarantees in life and also because I don’t trust those hugely popular weaning books (the likes of Annabel Karamel can really..), I want to share with you a few learnings. Let me present to you....


The Bermuda Triangle of Weaning. Because hey! Who knows what mysterious circumstances you might encounter eh?! So here we go!


Perseverance: Try once, twice, three times and then try again. Research says that A baby takes on average 17 attempts to finally accept a new type of food. Wow talk about playing hard to get! But doesn’t this depend on the individual baby? I mean I’m pretty sure my babies would have got ultra mad at me for giving them the same rejected material again and again 17 times or would have downright judged me for being really thick for not getting the message correctly say  the first three times. So, just be reasonable with persevering. Being reasonable also works wonders for your own sanity. 


Patience : Oodles and oodles of patience. 

Isn’t motherhood a perfect lesson in patience? I personally feel that enduring labour was easier for me as compared to weaning. With the former there was an end goal in sight, not so sure about the latter. In fact I would go to the extent of saying “oh weaning! Uncertainty be thy name”. What will baby eat? How much? Is it enough? What about vitamins et al and the list of harrowing questions continues. So yes, patience. And if you’re a clean freak attempting baby led weaning, good luck mate is all that I will say. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out why! Haha! 


Prayer : If all else fails, pray! Pray to the Almighty if it fits in with your beliefs. Or pray to your child. Ha! This type of prayer can involve mantras like “Eat your peas, eat your rice, drink your milk, swaahaaa” or bhajans like “Please eat your roti quickly, oh please eat your roti quicklyyyy...you will become big and strong, you will become big and strong, listen to me dear one, oh listen to me dear one!”.


So, there! Now that I’ve equipped you with this rather important bit of information, I need to go try my luck with feeding cauliflower to my very clever baby (don’t mind if I do!). Wish me luck won’t you?! 



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