What about runny/soft foods?

There will come a time when you want to feed your baby runny or soft foods - such as yoghurt, dips, cereals, mashed potato and the like. There are a few different ways your baby can go about eating these foods.

• Put the food into a bowl, and let your baby use their fingers to scoop the food up.
• Using other foods to scoop the runny foods up - vegetable sticks, bread sticks, "soldiers" of toast for example
• Pre-loaded spoon - you put the food onto a spoon and let your baby take it from you and feed themselves with it.

Of course your baby may also find their own way of getting the food into their mouths - they may pick up the bowl and put it to their mouth, or even pour the contents straight onto the high chair tray and lick it straight off there! Not ideal of course, but they are just learning, so it is fine to let them do that if that is what they want. It will be messy, but they will eventually learn what to do from watching other people.

Just remember that babies aren't going to have great table manners straight away! This period won't last forever, and you will be quite amazed at how quickly they can become neat and efficient eaters.