"Give them a baby bell," my mother-in-law announced on Tuesday over a cup of lukewarm tea, brandishing a little red wax wheel like it was a holy relic that would magically cure their fussiness. "Brilliant for calcium."
On Wednesday, the incredibly stern NHS health visitor looked at my loosely kept feeding log, audibly tutted, and declared round cheeses a lethal hazard. She suggested I instead focus my energy on roasting some baby bella mushrooms for their zinc content, speaking as though I run a professional Michelin-starred kitchen rather than a chaotic terraced house where I recently found a rogue fish finger inside my left shoe.
By Thursday evening, Dave from the pub—who has a four-year-old and therefore considers himself a seasoned military veteran of the parenting wars—told me I was overthinking the solid food phase entirely. He suggested I just stick them in front of an iPad playing "baby bella asmr" on YouTube so they'd be hypnotised enough to let me eat my own dinner in peace.
And there you've it. Three days, three completely different pieces of advice revolving around words that sound suspiciously similar, leaving me holding two screaming twin girls and wondering when everything became so ridiculously complicated.
The red wax and the choking hazard
Let’s start with the cheese. The classic baby bell cheese is one of those nostalgic snacks that immediately transports you back to a primary school packed lunch in 1998. It seems like the perfect thing to give a hungry toddler (mostly because it comes in a neat little package and doesn't require me to wash a frying pan).
But handing one of these to a baby is basically setting a trap for yourself. My GP—who looks young enough to still be eating pureed carrots himself—mentioned that while pasteurised dairy is entirely fine for their little stomachs, the physical shape of these mini cheeses is essentially a custom-designed airway plug. They're round, firm, and notoriously rubbery. If you give a toddler an intact mini cheese wheel, they'll almost certainly attempt to swallow it whole like a pelican.
And that’s before we even discuss the wax. The iconic red wax wrapper is held together by a tiny plastic pull-tab that snaps off prematurely roughly 80 percent of the time, leaving you trying to claw the casing off with your fingernails while a toddler screams at your ankles. Once you do get it off, the wax somehow ends up everywhere. I recently found a flattened piece of red wax fused to the living room radiator. It had melted, solidified, and essentially become a permanent architectural feature of our rented London home.
Instead of banning dairy completely or handing over an intact rubbery hazard while looking the other way, you just have to spend ten minutes chopping it into bizarre, paper-thin matchsticks that melt everywhere or mashing it into warm pasta so it becomes a gooey, unrecognisable mess that they'll inevitably smear across their chests. Which is exactly why I’ve stopped dressing them in anything nice for lunch. Our Organic Cotton Baby Bodysuit Sleeveless Infant Onesie usually bears the brunt of the dairy damage. It’s a perfectly decent piece of clothing—stretchy enough to pull over a flailing toddler’s head and, more importantly, capable of surviving a hot wash when covered in partially digested mozzarella and whatever else they managed to find on the kitchen floor.
Why fungi makes me unreasonably nervous
So, if the cheese is a choking hazard, what about the health visitor’s suggestion? The baby bella mushrooms.
First of all, "baby bella" is an entirely ridiculous name. They're just young portobello mushrooms (or cremini, if you want to be pedantic). But somewhere along the line, supermarket marketing departments decided that calling a fungus "baby" makes parents more likely to buy it. And honestly? It works. I bought two punnets yesterday while sleep-deprived, purely because the label made them sound like they belonged in a nursery.
The problem with mushrooms is the preparation. You can't give a baby a raw mushroom. My paediatrician muttered something vague about raw fungi containing tough cellular walls made of chitin—which sounds terrifyingly like the outer shell of a beetle—and trace amounts of a naturally occurring toxin that only disappears when you cook it. It’s wrapped in layers of medical uncertainty, but the basic gist I got was: don't let your infant eat raw fungi from the garden or the fridge.
This means you've to cook the baby bella until it's entirely soft and, frankly, quite unappetising to look at. I spent twenty minutes sautéing these things in unsalted butter yesterday. I finely minced them. I folded them into a delicate little omelette, feeling quite proud of myself. I placed the plate in front of Twin One (who's currently going through a phase where she only accepts foods that are entirely beige). She looked at the dark, squishy mushroom bits, looked at me with an expression of sheer betrayal, and threw the entire omelette onto the floor.
Twin Two, however, loved them. But because mushrooms are inherently slippery and rubbery when cooked, she couldn't quite grip them with her little pincer fingers. She ended up mashing the dark, buttery juices all over her highchair tray, her hair, and my trousers.
If you're going to attempt to cook something that requires this much intensive standing over a hot stove, you need a distraction. You can't chop and fry while two toddlers are clinging to your shins demanding to be held. My current survival strategy is to dump them on the rug under their Wooden Baby Gym | Rainbow Play Gym Set with Animal Toys. It's genuinely one of the few things in our house I actually like. It doesn’t play tinny, electronic pop music that makes my ears bleed, and the hanging wooden toys provide enough tactile distraction to buy me exactly fourteen minutes of cooking time. It’s aesthetically pleasing, too, which is nice considering the rest of the living room looks like a primary school was hit by a tornado.
Explore our collection of clothes that can survive your baby's chaotic weaning experiments.
The internet wants my kids to listen to chewing noises
Which brings us to the most baffling part of my week: Dave’s suggestion to lean into the "baby bella asmr" trend.
For the uninitiated, ASMR (Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response) is that internet phenomenon where people whisper into high-tech microphones or tap their fingernails on glass to give listeners a "tingly" feeling. It’s weird, but whatever gets you to sleep, right?
But algorithmically, things have gotten out of hand. If you search for baby bella asmr, you tumble down a very strange rabbit hole. You either find grown adults whispering intensely while aggressively chopping cremini mushrooms, or you find compilation videos of actual babies loudly crunching on pickles, squishing soft foods, and smacking their lips while millions of people watch.
Dave swears by these videos. He says his kid watches other babies eating and it somehow hypnotises him into eating his own dinner. I tried it for exactly three minutes. The sound of someone else’s child loudly chewing directly into a microphone through my phone speaker was enough to induce a mild migraine. We already have enough chewing noises in this house. The sheer volume of wet, lip-smacking sounds my twins make when trying to gum a piece of toast is deafening. I don't need to outsource the noise to YouTube.
More importantly, the whole point of babies interacting with food is the messy, real-life sensory experience. Watching a screen of someone else squishing a mushroom does absolutely nothing for their fine motor skills. Squishing the actual cooked baby bella mushroom themselves—and wiping the resulting paste onto the dog—is how they learn about texture.
If they really need to chew on something for sensory feedback, especially when their teeth are coming in and they're trying to gnaw the legs off the coffee table, I just shove a Panda Teether Silicone Baby Bamboo Chew Toy in their general direction. It’s got all these little textured bumps on it that seem to satisfy their urge to destroy things with their gums, and I can just chuck it in the dishwasher when it inevitably gets coated in dog hair and drool.
I suppose that's the reality of the whole weaning process. You get bombarded with advice from all sides. People tell you to feed them this specific cheese, avoid that specific shape, cook this exact fungus, and definitely put on this specific internet video to keep them quiet. You nod politely, take whatever fragments of advice won't actively put your child in A&E, and discard the rest.
Sometimes you win, and they eat a beautifully prepared, zinc-rich mushroom omelette. Most of the time, you step barefoot on one of those Gentle Baby Building Block Sets we bought last month (they're rubbery, which is marginally better than stepping on hard plastic, but it still makes you question your life choices at 6 AM) while trying to scrape dried cheese off the kitchen floor.
Either way, they survive. And eventually, you get to sit down.
Frequently Asked Messy Questions
Can I just give my baby an unwrapped baby bell cheese?
Absolutely not, unless you enjoy low-level panic. My GP warned me that the rubbery texture and round shape make it a massive choking hazard for babies under two. You have to melt it down into something else, or spend ages slicing it into incredibly thin matchsticks that they can easily mash with their toothless little gums.
Are baby bella mushrooms safe for a 6-month-old?
Yeah, but only if you cook the absolute life out of them. Babies should never eat raw mushrooms because their digestive systems just can't handle the tough cellular walls, and there's some trace stuff in raw fungi you want to cook off. I usually sauté them until they're completely limp and sad-looking, then chop them into tiny pieces.
Why is everyone talking about baby bella asmr?
It's an internet rabbit hole where people either watch adults whispering while chopping mushrooms, or watch babies loudly chewing on crunchy foods into a microphone. Some parents use it to distract their kids during meals. Personally, I find the sound of amplified toddler chewing deeply unsettling and prefer to just let my kids squish their own food in real life.
How do I stop the cheese wax from getting everywhere?
You don't. You just accept that the red wax is now part of your home's ecosystem. But seriously, open it over the bin, far away from your child's grasping hands. The second they get hold of that wax, it'll end up stuck to the bottom of your sock or mashed into the sofa cushions.
What if my baby hates the texture of mushrooms?
Don't force it. One of my twins loves them, the other treats them like toxic waste. They're slippery and weird in a little mouth. If they hate the feeling of them, try finely mincing them and hiding them in a sauce or an omelette so they still get the zinc and vitamins without having to deal with the rubbery squish.
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