Starting Solids

Somebody’s mother-in-law has Opinions about purees, the kind delivered as a story about how she did it in 1987 and everyone survived, which, fair, but also the smoke detectors back then weren’t hardwired and we all still got in the car without a car seat so survival isn’t really the bar I’m working with here. S

omebody read one Instagram post about baby-led weaning and now talks about it the way people talk about a religious conversion, full sentences, eyes a little far away.

Somebody else, in the group chat, at 9pm, unprompted, wants to walk you through the entire allergen introduction protocol in the exact order you’re supposed to do it in, like there’s a wrong answer and the wrong answer ends in tragedy, and meanwhile you are standing in your kitchen eating a Kraft single straight out of the package because that’s what was within arm’s reach at 11pm, and you are about to go lecture a six month old about the importance of varied nutrition.

Nobody is coming to check your homework here. There’s no inspector with a clipboard confirming you did purees in the right sequence, or that you left the correct number of days between the egg and the peanut butter, and also, side note, I get why that sequencing stuff exists and it’s not nothing, but it lives in a different category than which feeding philosophy you’ve aligned yourself with on the internet. There’s just you, a baby who is going to eat with their hands regardless of what you intended, because babies have never once respected a method, and a kitchen floor that needs mopping no matter which one you picked. I’ve seen the floor under a strict BLW household and the floor under a strict puree household and I regret to inform you they look the same.

The hazard isn’t puree versus BLW, it’s choking, and I’d rather be a little unsentimental and direct about that than vague and anxious about it, because vague and anxious is where you end up googling at 1am instead of really learning. SolidStarts has already done the legwork on what’s risky at what stage and how to cut it so it isn’t – grapes, hot dogs, grapes again – and that’s more useful than any debate about which camp is morally superior. And if the anxiety isn’t really about the food, if it’s about what your hands would do in the moment if something went sideways, the answer isn’t more research, it’s an actual infant CPR class, an hour or two out of your week, and you walk out the other side knowing your hands know something, which matters more than your brain knowing something, in my experience. The fear was never really about the puree.

Some days it’s a pouch, handed over standing up, because you are tired and we invented pouches. Other days, for reasons that may say something about my own relationship to food or may say nothing at all, I have personally blended chicken liver into a paste because I read it’s good for iron and I had a free twenty minutes, which, in retrospect, is a strange way to spend a free twenty minutes, and I stood there afterward smelling my own hands and having a small private moment about who I’d become. And some days, listen, some days it’s two of your own fries, in the car, from McDonald’s, because that’s what’s in front of everyone.

The baby is not building a permanent relationship to food off week fourteen of solids, they are not. They are going to eat fries and broccoli and the mother-in-law’s pureed sweet potato and somebody’s wedding cake in twenty-six years and none of it traces back to whether you did rice cereal first, I promise you, I have looked into this more than is reasonable. Eating is one of the only things every single person in human history has figured out, generally without a feeding consultant, on every continent, in every economic condition, for the entire span of the species, so.

What actually changes the day to day isn’t which camp you’re in, it’s whether you know how to cut the grape, whether you took the hour for the CPR class so the fear has somewhere to go instead of just circling, and whether you’ve let yourself off the hook for the fact that some nights dinner is whatever’s closest, which is also true for you, standing over the counter at midnight with a slice of processed cheese folded into an envelope, eating it like nobody’s watching.