If you love cooking your own food, and you happen to have a baby ready for weaning, you’re in for a treat, so to speak.
Cooking without salt or sugar for example, and starting with very soft food or with baby led weaning with cooked pieces of vegetables or fruit, is a fun, challenging and exciting journey.
There are plenty of’tools’ needed not only to ensure your small does actually eat some nourishment but also to avoid such nourishment ending up all over the floor or worse (we’ve had curtains smeared in squash puree and carpet dotted with prune juice).
The market is actually pretty saturated with’baby weaning’ accessories and not all are worth the money. Oxo, a well known kitchen accessories brand, offer a large number of weaning and baby feeding items, from lunch boxes to food containers and drinking cups.
We road tested two particular products, the Soft Spout Transitions Cup and a Silicone Feeding Spoons.
The Soft Spout Sippy Cup has a unique, almond-shaped spout that opens easily as soon as your little one’s lips touch it, and is specially designed to make it an easy transition from bottles or breast feeding. The sturdy cap covers the silicone spout to keep it clean in diaper bags, and prevents leaking.
The Set also includes a Training Lid to mimic grown-up cups, and when your big kid is ready, the disk can be removed to be used as an open cup.
Having used already a number of similar cups before, we were keen to see how our little one was going to deal with this. The shape is lovely, small but not tiny, and we really like the shape and the design. The click lid, despite proving popular as a game and being a bit distracting from the actual drinking task, is really useful, because detachable lid come off constantly.
We are not at the next stage yet, but the cup is meant to be an on-going’training’ cup and will be an actual baby water cup once he won’t need the spout anymore, making it cost effective as well (we’ve already discarded two water other cups having outgrown them). It is not cheap at £10.50 but we felt it will be worth its value in the long run. It is BPA free and dishwasher safe, however it is made in China.
The Feeding Spoon has a food-grade silicone coating that gives the spoons a soft touch. Each shallow spoonful holds just enough for baby’s mouth, while the contoured handle is durable and ergonomic. The spoon was, at first sight, a little odd. We thought the different materials were going to be tricky (the spoon is silicon, the handle hard plastic, the neck metal).
Yet once we tried it, it revealed itself as the best spoon used so far, its shape really smooth and very easy for a baby’s mouth to eat each mouthful without too much spillage. It is already truly soft, and doesn’t scratch with little teeth. Appearances can be deceiving! A set of two spoons retails at £6 which is in our view, extremely good value.
The full range of baby products is available on the OXO website.
to pick