Weaning visit from Health Visitor

We haven't heard from our health visitor since Baby M was 7 weeks old, we contacted the office last week as we were concerned that Baby M has been finishing his 7oz bottles.  It turns out our health visitor is on long term sick leave.  Another health visitor came out to see us to have a chat about our options with Baby M but also to give us our weaning chat.

Firstly we had a chat about Baby M and his development.  He loves standing and was doing his standing man when the health visitor arrived - she was really impressed and pleased with how strong he appears on his legs.  She thinks he might stand/walk before he crawls as he would rather be standing than sitting.  She was also happy with his babbling (he started to get tired not long after she arrived and he started his "dring dring" routine)

It was reassuring for us to hear everything was as it should be and that we are doing things that we should.  As first time parents we often feel we are winging it and making it up as we go along.

We then turned the discussion to Baby M and his appetite.  He has always been a hungry-ish baby but recently he has been having all of his bottles and instead of waiting 4 hours between feeds it's now 3 hours.  The health visitor informed us that babies go through a growth spurt at 4 months and this could account for his increase in appetite.  She encouraged us to stick with our current approach and see how we get on.  If we can manage to get to 5 months she stated this would be better to start introducing baby rice but she also recognised that we might not be able to wait that long. 

We then had a chat about weaning in general.  We are going to cook our own food for Baby M and use pouches/bottles at a minimum.  I've seen a great product from Fill and Squeeze that I want to get for when we are going out and about, that way we can have our own food in pouches - brilliant!!

We talked about the fruits that we can give Baby M (apples, pears, melons) and vegetables (all really but especially carrot, butternut squash, sweet potato, potato). After 6 months we can look at introducing meats and fish.  The health visitor gave us a great booklet to read that has lots of information in.

We need to get some round flat weaning spoons and some bowls.  We also need to get some tubs to store the food we make in as we will only need small amounts to start with.  I can see our freezer being full of tiny tubs!


Our next visit will be between 7-9 months old and they will check his development further and chat to us about the next stage of weaning.