Today, we gave our Little Buddy his first taste of food – carrot puree from Bledina’s “Mon 1er Petits Pots | Legumes” range. It was the same baby food that The Boy was weaned on 30 years ago.

The standard advice is to begin weaning at 6 months, but the Boy wanted to try giving the Little Bud some purees over the Christmas period because he would be on holiday and have his parents on hand, so the process would be less stressful in case the process turns out to be messy or difficult.

I was torn about whether to start weaning Tadpole over Christmas (see this post), but eventually, the deciding factors that tilted the balance in favour of were: i) he had woken up practically every hour the night before, ii) the grandparents were clearly quite keen on seeing the start of his weaning process.

I had decided to be relaxed about his first tastes – to make sure it was an enjoyable process and not force-feeding him or worrying about his intake. After all, that’s one of the advantages of starting the weaning process early – there would be no need to worry if he was getting enough iron and vitamins from solids.

As it turned out, I needn’t have worried – today’s first taste went surprisingly well. Baby Ao took the feeding in his stride, although he was a little bit sceptical about the taste. He actually finished almost all of the puree I prepared for him, about 7 heaped teasponfuls, even though probably half of it ended up on his bib and clothes. He was pretty calm about it throughout – only getting cranky towards the end, and he didn’t swipe at or push away the spoon much.

Since the first taste has been so successful, we’re going to start the weaning process proper in the new year. I’m planning to feed him some baby rice and prepare his vegetable and fruit purees from fresh ingredients. But we also bought a range of vegetable Petits Pots since we’re going to be in the US for a week in January, and it will be difficult to prepare fresh food in a hotel, and I don’t trust American baby food.