Skip to main content

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?! 



Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Comfort Food

Today, as I hurriedly grabbed the pot of plain yogurt from the fridge to scoop into my boys’ plates, I was reminded of an incident during my early days in the UK. Having recently arrived in the UK, I was wistfully in the quest for something that reminded me of home, of Mumbai. I distinctly remember that cold winter’s day in the year when the financial recession combined with thick inches of snow made for a grim state of mind. A mind like mine then wasn’t bereft of existential questions. And so, I braved the biting cold to step out into the freezing afternoon, dressed as a novice would – just a jacket, thin woollen gloves and an ill fitting cap.  I walked into the local supermarket as I often do when I am feeling a little glum. The general buzz of activity along with easily accessible food aid in calming my overactive thought processes. I sauntered into the dairy aisle without really meaning to as who in their right mind would consciously enter the cold storage area without having a...
Post a Comment
Read more

It’s Ok To Not Be Ok

Whilst the motherland struggles with the worst covid surge yet, I feel like a helpless outsider, constantly on edge, always worrying about my family and friends in India. The images flooding the news are heart wrenching to say the least. I recently read a poem by Meera Kandasamy and the line “my country is a crematorium” shook me because it couldn’t be further from the truth. As adults we are conditioned to say “I’m fine “, “I’m ok” when in reality we are not. The admission of not being ok is somehow equated to being weak and this unhealthy dialogue serves to damage our mental health. Also saying you are not ok makes the person who asked uncomfortable and we have learnt over the years to always try and steer clear of awkwardness. As moms we are expected to just get on with it and we do because many a times we don’t have a choice or we assume that we don’t. A lot depends on us doesn’t it? So how do we help ourselves in such distressing times? Here are a few things (for lack of a better ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Validating Vulnerability

Being strong and brave has always been admired whereas expressing any sort of vulnerability is looked down upon. When someone is articulating their feelings of vulnerability, our first response is to say “oh you are so brave” or “you are a fighter”. We say this perhaps with the intention of making the other person feel better. However by saying this what we are doing is that we are indirectly telling this other person that their feelings of vulnerability are in fact not valid because hey remember you’re strong right ?  We need to change the conversation here and it needs to happen now. The person who is accepting their vulnerability and speaking about it is in fact very strong. It takes a special kind of strength to be vulnerable. So yes they know they are strong. They didn’t ask for your validation about it . What they did ask was for you to acknowledge their feelings of vulnerability rather than trying to put a “positive spin” on everything. Because sometimes , it’s important to ...
Post a Comment
Read more