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.

Weaning: When Your Child Keeps Giving Food To The Dogs!

In a couple of short weeks, we will be celebrating The Boy’s 1^st birthday. I’m looking forward to it in some ways – the marker of his first year, the first of many birthday celebrations to come; But in other ways I’m not looking forward to it, as it is the marker of him no longer being a ‘baby’ and it means that a whole 12 months has gone by since I gave birth to him yet still I am two dress sizes bigger than I was pre-pregnancy and I still don’t feel like I have the faintest, foggiest clue what I’m meant to be doing in this job as ‘mummy’.

As we all know, part of them growing up is all the fun of weaning. The Boy started on baby rice at four months old but wasn’t interested in the least – he wanted to move onto more interesting things from the moment we tried anything other than milk. The Boy has been exclusively formula fed since he was six weeks old – he rejected breastfeeding from the start, so for the first six weeks I was expressing and combination feeding, but after The Hubby returned to work it was just too much to try and look after The Boy, express for a good four hours a day, as well as clean bottles, make up formula and everything else that needs to be done all day. So anyway, he was five and a half months when we tried Rusks mashed in formula milk, and baby cereals for breakfast with fruit pots in the afternoon, and he’s done really well. On the whole he loves his food (though there are moments!) and he is generally good about eating.

The thing is, now he’s nearly a year old, I kind of expected him to be a little more independent about eating by now. I don’t know whether that’s accurate, whether I was expecting too much too soon, but I presumed by this point he’d be trying to spoon feed himself, certainly holding his own cup of water when he had a drink. He doesn’t; He’ll sit like a baby bird with his mouth open waiting for you to pop in the next spoonful or attach him to the water beaker. Finger food is a different matter: He loves getting his hands into that and playing with the different textures (and flinging a lot of it on the floor). And herein lies my current issue.

Our two hairy hounds of hell, one male and one female, are generally pretty good about not begging for food. The female is a bit weaker about it and she will sometimes forget herself and sit looking pleading at your feet while you’re eating, but she was a rescue dog and we don’t know her history, but she was very underweight when we first adopted her so I think it’s safe to say that, combined with the fact that she’s a complete bitch (I don’t mean that as an insult, I mean it quite literally!) means that she is constantly on the lookout for food. She’s a random cross breed and is a fairly small size dog (think about the size of a spaniel) so when she puts on weight it really shows. Our male dog is pedigree, and burns off his excess calories easily by all the running around he does, so a treat or two doesn’t hurt his figure; but she has quickly become a porky little rain barrel!

The trouble is, while neither of them will beg for food from The Boy as such, they are never far away when he is in the high chair at mealtimes. The Boy, such is his nature, wants to share everything right now, so whatever finger food he has; biscuit, banana, toast, whatever – he’ll have a couple of mouthfuls then offer it to the dogs. Now while they get interested, they won’t take it from him, as either myself or The Hubby (or whoever is feeding The Boy) is sitting there watching them closely to make sure they don’t – but if they don’t take it from him, The Boy will casually fling it on the floor. The female dog will break her neck on the laminate floor racing to get to whatever tit-bit it may be – she’s been known to eat orange and red peppers, carrot sticks and cucumber – but the male is a little more reserved and he’ll only eat it if it drops right in front of him and it’s something of interest – a biscuit or a piece of toast for instance.

I’ve tried locking them outside (very noisy – they bark and shriek like crazy to be let back indoors, and the noise puts The Boy off eating altogether as he is very easily distracted). We can’t shut them out of the room we have the highchair in as our kitchen, dining area and front room have no doors separating them, just open doorways, and the dogs aren’t allowed past the kitchen doorway into the rest of the house as the female cannot be trusted not to mess (again we think it stems back to her being a rescue dog, she’s fine when contained downstairs, but allow her the run of upstairs and she’ll ruin the carpet within a week). The female has a large cage in the kitchen that we put her in overnight or when we’re out (again because of the messing problem which she’ll do downstairs if left out overnight or while we’re out) so I have sometimes put her in the cage while feeding The Boy, which leaves the male dog free but he tends to go and lie in the front room when she’s out of the way. However it seems pointless as The Boy will still drop food on the floor in anticipation of when they come back into the room.

As I said, the male dog it isn’t so much of a worry, but the female is now seriously porky (her head looks out of proportion to her body!) she’s lost her waist entirely and she waddles about with her fat little bottom wiggling from side to side like a real hoochie! To top the problem off, I can’t take both of them out for a walk on my own, nevermind with The Boy in his pushchair as well, as the male is frightened of everything and goes scatty at the traffic and the noises it makes and the female has no road sense and just wants to bomb out into the middle of the road every two minutes. It takes both me and The Hubby to walk them, so we can have one each, and even then it can be a nightmare if you see another dog, or a cyclist, or someone on a skateboard or rollerskates, as the male dog will go scatty and flip around at the end of his lead barking (the vet says it’s a fear response) while the female dog will go scatty trying to get to them to say hello and potentially have her tummy tickled. Since The Hubby works funny shifts, nine times out of ten he isn’t home until The Boy is in bed, which means one of us has to stay at home, which means we can’t walk the dogs, which means the dogs don’t get a walk as often as they should. This doesn’t help the porky female wear off those extra calories!

I’m at a loss – If I stop giving The Boy finger food he’ll never learn to feed himself properly, but as long as I continue he is dropping it on the floor for the dogs and the female is hoovering it up like a mad thing and gaining weight by the day! Any suggestions gratefully received!!