We had a very chaotic weaning day yesterday. Charlie tried toast with an apple puree substitute for jam. He licked the apple puree off, then got down to sucking the toast. Nyom! Toast is a winner! At lunchtime I experienced the opposite extreme – I gave him cauliflower florets. Charlie absolutely loved putting them in his mouth, but hated the taste (or at least I presume he did). But obviously he’s slow to learn, because he kept trying the cauliflower again and again and again, excited each time he manoeuvred the rapidly disintegrating cauliflower to his mouth, and then screwing up his mouth in disgust. I took pity on the poor thing and gave him some pasta that I’d just finished cooking – but perhaps plain pasta looks too much like cauliflower, because he wasn’t too enthralled. The sauce went down a bit better, but weirdly enough I had to offer it to him on a wooden spoon before he’d deign to try it, and then there was only half a teaspoon left. The little thing looked like he wanted to eat, so we tried banana again, me holding a whole piece close to his mouth, and him headbutting it quite successfully.

I’m quite confused by what I’m trying to achieve by weaning Charlie. Is the aim to get him steadily eating more and more food, knowing how much he’s consuming and progressing merrily towards three meals a day? I’m so target driven that it’s very tempting. But Baby Led Weaning would have food be about play and discovery at this age – about learning the skills to pick up a piece of squidgy banana and use a spoon and the fun of new tastes and textures. For the next few days I’ve planned both finger food and easy-to-eat food, so that hopefully Charlie will get a bit of both experiences.

So this morning Charlie refused baby rice for a second time. Obviously he recognises that it has all the flavour of wallpaper paste. We bought a 100g box, and we’ve used about 3g, though, so Charlie will be being given plenty of opportunity to reform his opinions. We might do him a favour and mix it with a puree next time. Lunch of pasta and homemade tomato and pepper sauce was more of a hit on the taste front, but Phil cleared up the mess when he got home from work – most of it ended up on Charlie’s vest, t-shirt, trousers, socks, highchair, pillow to prop him up in the high chair, floor, my arm, my cardigan. It’s like feeding the five thousand – if you collected up all the bits and pieces afterwards there would probably be about 10 times the amount I originally gave him.