Product Review: Steadyco Weaning Spoons

What? Steadyco Weaning Spoons (set of three)

RRP? I paid £3.50 for the set at my local Tesco store, but they’re not listed on the Steadyco website so I’m not sure what the RRP is.

Where from? I can’t find them in any store locally and internet searches are showing up other Steadyco products but not this particular one, which is a shame. I will e-mail Steadyco and ask their advice!

The Boy is now a year old, and since the success of the Nuby Toss Or Wash Beakers getting him to drink by himself, I wanted to try the next stage and see whether I could get him to attempt feeding himself. He doesn’t seem to enjoy mealtimes much anymore, and gets very annoyed and frustrated when you’re feeding him, so a friend of mine recommended I just let him get on with it and see what happens; Which I have done, and what happens is a big mess and I’m not entirely sure how much food The Boy actually eats and how much the Hairy Hounds of Hell end up consuming, but it seems to make The Boy happier.

In the pack of Steadyco Weaning Spoons you get a standard plain spoon for you to feed the child: A spoon with a flat top and holes in it so you can mush up pieces of food into something easier for LO to deal with, and a spoon which is angled to encourage LO to feed themselves (it’s easier for them to deal with a specially angled spoon than it is a straight handled one).

I prepared The Boy’s lunch as usual, put him in a long sleeved plastic bib to protect his clothes and wore my own kitchen apron to protect my clothes! Then I handed him the angled spoon to hold and started feeding him with the normal one. As usual, the first couple of mouthfuls went without issue, but then he got bored and annoyed and started pushing my hand away from him whenever I approached his mouth with another spoonful. So I tapped the spoon in his hand and said, “You do it, then.” And leaned back.

It was quite funny, very sweet and hugely messy but sure enough The Boy dunked the spoon into his lunch and tried to feed himself. (He also tried to feed me!) He ended up with lunch in his eyebrows, all over his cheeks and up his nose, in his hair and even on his ears! The Hairy Hounds of Hell thoroughly enjoyed the fruity chicken casserole raining from the heaves too! On the whole, though, I think The Boy managed to get a fair bit of his lunch in him! He experimented holding the spoon in both hands to work out which way worked better, he tried using the spoon handle to dunk in the lunch and then suck the lunch off it, and he tried holding the spoon in one hand and smacking his other hand in his lunch just to see what worked best for him!

It took us a long time to eat lunch that day – around an hour or so – but he was much happier doing it ‘his’ way than he has been for ages when I’ve been trying to feed him, which I think is a success in itself. I don’t want a battle over eating – To me that just kicks off a food issue, and I definitely don’t want that. He’ll eat when he’s hungry, drink when he’s dry, and if the Hairy Hounds of Hell end up sampling his lunch and my hair gets coated with baby rice pudding then never mind, we just have to live with that!

I washed the spoon up once he’d had enough lunch and he used it again to eat his pudding with. This was much quicker, far more effective and you could see the concentration in his face as he dunked the spoon into a pretty small pot in his efforts to get at his favourite strawberry flavour fromage frais! He grew bored by the time he was onto the second pot and I ended up feeding him that one – I think simply the fact that he couldn’t get it out of the pot and into his mouth quickly enough was his main problem there!

I absolutely love this little angled spoon, it makes it far easier for The Boy to handle his own food, and I would really love to get some more of these; but sadly I can’t find them anywhere! I am going to write to Steadyco to see whether they can offer any advice as this product no longer features on their website.

For his dinner that evening, The Boy had fish fingers, alphabites and spaghetti shapes, and I used the mushing spoon to break it all down into pieces he was comfortable eating. As well as being able to mush the food well, this spoon has a straighter bowl so it’s flat instead of rounded like a normal spoon, and the edge of it can be used to chop very large chunks into smaller ones before mushing. Dinner was less of a success as he got completely sidetracked by peeling the coating off the fish fingers and eating that separately to the pieces of fish, and then he plunged both hands into the spaghetti shapes and proceeded to fling his arms around the room, coating me (minus my pinny!) and the floor, the Hairy Hounds of Hell and most of everything else in the room with spaghetti shapes and tomato sauce. The Hubby nearly had heart failure but the PC came up clean again afterwards! The Boy did try to feed himself again but I think the problem was that as it was a ‘proper’ dinner and not baby food from a jar it wouldn’t stay on the spoon as well so it was more difficult and required more concentration and he lost interest. I eventually managed to coax him into eating some apple crumble and custard baby pudding using the spoon, but about a third of the way through he decided he’d had enough and the whole lot ended up on the floor, spoon and bowl and all! (Hairy Hounds of Hell thought their Christmases had come at once until The Hubby stepped over and told them to go away and he cleaned up without their assistance!)

Ever since, I’ve handed The Boy the angled spoon to have a go himself and sometimes he will, sometimes he won’t, but he loves having it in his hand even if he doesn’t want to use it, and that to me is good because it means its comfortable, he associates it with mealtimes and he is becoming more used to the idea of holding cutlery when eating rather than just throwing it on the floor.

Just the mushing spoon and the angled spoon makes this pack a worthwhile purchase to me, the standard weaning spoon is nothing special but it’s another weaning spoon to have which is always handy and it’s got a fairly long handle compared to a lot of them which makes it easier to get food out of the bottom of the large size baby food jars.

A lovely four out of five for this set, very handy to have and as they’re dishwasher safe, microwave safe, steriliser safe, freezer safe and BPA free too.