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Starting Solids

Somewhere to Sit

Before anyone eats anything, bub needs somewhere to sit, and the chair aisle has quietly become its own ecosystem.

High Chair

The command centre for the next two-ish years, so it's worth thinking about how it'll live in your house. The spectrum runs from a $30 plastic number you can hose off in the backyard to timber chairs that grow with your child until high school. Mums who've done it before will tell you the most important feature isn't the padding or the recline, it's how fast you can wipe it down, because you'll be doing that three times a day. Look for a five-point harness and a sticker showing it meets the Australian standard.

High Chair Cushion

Some high chairs (especially the timber grow-with-me styles) are gorgeous but about as padded as a park bench, and a brand new sitter can slump sideways in all that space. A cushion pads bub out so they sit snug and upright. Just check it's machine washable, because it will wear more dinner than the bib does.

High Chair Footrest

Nobody warns you about this one. Dangling feet make it harder for little kids to sit stable and focus on eating, which is why feeding therapists bang on about "feet supported" so much. If your high chair has an adjustable footrest built in, you're sorted. If it doesn't, clip-on footrests exist for exactly this, and they're one of those unglamorous buys that can genuinely improve dinnertime.

High Chair Toy

There's a gap between bub going in the chair and the food arriving, and that gap has a scream in it. A suction toy sticks to the tray and buys you the ninety seconds it takes to mash a banana. Some kids decide the toy is more interesting than dinner, so read the room.

Portable High Chair

Grandma's house doesn't have a high chair, and the cafe's one has mystery crust on the straps. A portable high chair (fabric harness styles that fold into the nappy bag, or clip-on seats that attach to a table) means bub can sit safely anywhere. If you eat out a lot or split time between houses, this earns its spot fast.

Toddler Booster Seat

The middle child between the high chair and a big-kid chair. It straps onto a normal dining chair and boosts your toddler up to table height, usually with a harness for the wrigglers. Great when the high chair starts feeling babyish (their words, delivered around 18 months) or when floor space is tight.

Toddler Dining Chair

And this one's the booster's lookalike: a standalone, toddler-sized chair that brings them to table height on its own legs, no adult chair required. Think the grow-with-me timber styles. If you're choosing between the two, boosters travel and store better, dining chairs feel more like real furniture and last longer. Plenty of families never own either and just wait out the high chair.

Making the Food

You do not need a small kitchen appliance to mash a pumpkin. But if you're batch cooking, some of these save your sanity.

Baby Food

Some nights dinner is not happening, and there's no shame in a pouch. Jars, tins and pouches take zero prep, keep for months and travel without leaking, so some families use them daily and others keep two in reserve for the nights that fall apart. Read the label for age suitability, since some toddler snacks are sweeter than they look.

Baby Food Maker

If your plan involves a Sunday afternoon, a bag of veg and a week of dinners in the freezer, this is the gadget aimed squarely at you. It steams and then purees in the same jug, so there's one thing to load, one to wash and nothing to tip from pot to blender while it's hot. A saucepan and a blender get you to the same place with more washing up, so it comes down to how much of your feeding is purees.

Food Blender

The regular kitchen kind, or a stick blender, pressed into baby duty. Does everything the baby food maker does except the steaming, and keeps earning its keep making smoothies long after the puree stage ends (which, heads up, is only a couple of months). If you're buying one thing for purees, mums who've been here would mostly tell you this is it.

Food Masher

You're at a cafe, bub's lunch is coming off your own plate, and a fork is doing a poor job on avocado. A small masher, often sold with its own bowl, squishes one serve at a time and lives in the nappy bag between outings. At home a fork honestly handles most of it, so this one earns its spot out and about rather than on the bench.

Cook Book

A starting solids cookbook does more than recipes: the good ones walk you through what to offer when, how to handle allergens, and what texture to aim for at each stage. If you're a "just tell me what to do" person at 5pm, having a plan on the bench beats scrolling one-handed through nine contradictory blogs.

Freezer Pods

One pumpkin becomes fourteen dinners, which is the whole argument for batch cooking. Puree goes into the little silicone wells, freezes solid, and pops out in meal-sized blocks you can bag up and defrost one at a time. The ones with measurements moulded into the wells save you guessing how much bub actually got through.

Storage Containers

Little lidded containers for fridge leftovers, prepped finger foods and freezer batches too big for pods. You almost certainly own containers already, so this is less "buy new" and more "accept that your good ones are about to be annexed". Small sizes matter here; baby serves are tiny and giant containers freezer-burn them.

Food Tracker

A journal or app where you log what bub tried and how it went, most useful for tracking new allergen introductions and any reactions, which is exactly the info your GP will want if something flares up. Families with allergy history tend to swear by it. Everyone else lasts about a week, and that's okay too.

Fresh Food Feeder

Gagging is the bit that makes parents nervous, and this is the product that exists for that nerve. Fruit goes in the mesh or silicone pouch, bub gnaws on the handle, and only tiny gummable bits make it through. Some feeding experts point out bub isn't learning much chewing through mesh, so it works better as a bridge than a destination.

At the Table

Where the suction lookalikes live. Spoon-fed purees lean towards bowls, baby-led weaning leans towards plates, and everything here gets thrown, which is why "does it bounce" is a real buying criteria.

Baby Spoon

Try a teaspoon from the cutlery drawer once and you'll see the problem: too deep, too hard, far too big for a mouth that size. The soft tips and shallow bowls go easy on gums, and the short chunky handles on some let bub have a go themselves from day one.

Kids Cutlery

The next size up, for toddlers graduating to feeding themselves properly. Chunky handles, blunt fork prongs that still actually spear food, and knives that cut a banana but not a finger. This one arrives later in the solids story, so no need to buy it alongside the first spoons unless you love a complete set.

Dinnerware

Whatever you serve dinner on is going to hit the floor eventually, so anything that shatters is out. Silicone, bamboo and plastic all bounce; what's worth checking on the packet is whether it's dishwasher and microwave safe, because that's where the cheap sets fall down. Divided plates are weirdly polarising, and some kids treat the separation of foods as a legal matter.

Suction Bowl

The flinging tends to start right around the time the eating does. A suction base grips the high chair tray so the bowl stays put when it's shoved, which suits the puree and porridge era when there's something scoopable to keep contained. Fair warning from the trenches: determined toddlers treat the suction as a puzzle, and some solve it by week two.

Suction Plate

Same suction trick, flat plate format, and this is the one for the finger-food and baby-led-weaning crowd, where food gets picked up rather than scooped. If you're choosing just one of the suction twins, think about how you're planning to feed: purees lean bowl, finger foods lean plate, and plenty of mums end up with one of each.

Placemat

Once bub moves off the high chair tray and onto the actual table you'd like to keep nice, the splash zone becomes your problem. A wipeable mat marks out their patch and catches what lands. Some come with a built-in lip or divided sections, at which point they're basically a plate impersonating a placemat.

Sippy Cup

The training-wheels cup, with a spout or straw and a valve so it doesn't rain water when it's inevitably thrown. From six months bub can be offered water in a cup with meals, and this is how most families do it without mopping. Worth knowing: dentists and speech folks generally prefer straw cups or open cups over long-term spout use, so treat the spout as a phase, not a lifestyle.

Containing the Mess

Weaning is interior redecoration with extra steps. This is your damage control.

Bib

The classic for a reason. For solids you want the wipeable kind (silicone or coated fabric) over the cloth dribble bibs you've been using, because pumpkin puree laughs at cotton. The ones with a scoop pocket at the bottom double as a snack-recovery system, which bub will discover before you do.

Smock Bib

The bib's full-coverage cousin: long sleeves, covers the whole outfit, ties or velcros at the back. This is for baby-led weaning, spaghetti night, and any child who eats with their elbows. Daycare mums, grab a couple, because "artwork smock" and "yoghurt smock" are the same garment.

Food Catcher

Sometimes a deep-pocket bib on steroids, sometimes a tray that bridges the gap between high chair and child. Either way the job is the same: intercept food between mouth and floor. If your high chair has a gap bub posts food through like a tiny mail slot, this is the fix.

Tray Liner

Wiping down a high chair tray after bolognese is the worst two minutes of the day, and it happens three times a day. A silicone or disposable sheet takes the hit instead, then peels off and goes in the dishwasher. Skip it if your tray lifts off and fits in the sink; grab it if yours doesn't, or if you're at the third clean-up of the day stage of despair.

Splat Mat

On tiles, a quick mop handles it. On carpet, or in a rental with pale floorboards, what lands under the high chair is a genuine problem. A big wipeable sheet spread underneath catches the lot and shakes out into the bin. A cut-open garbage bag technically does the same job; this is the version you're not embarrassed about when visitors come.

Wet Bag

Solids go mobile around the same time your nappy bag stops having any spare room. The yoghurt-soaked smock and the abandoned half-banana get zipped in and forgotten until you're home, instead of touching everything else in there. You may already own one from swimming or cloth nappies, and yes, it's the same bag.

Out & About

Solids don't stay home. The gear splits into two eras: pouch-and-spoon for the early months, then the snack cups and containers that take over once bub starts self-feeding.

Food Pouch Spoon/Spout

You're in a car park with a pouch and no spoon, which is how most mums meet this product. A little attachment screws onto the pouch top and turns it into either a spoon you feed with or a soft spout bub sucks from. Handy for travel, though it's worth mixing in real spoon feeds and finger foods, since dentists aren't wild about all-day grazing from a spout.

Reusable Food Pouches

At $2.50 a pop, supermarket pouches add up fast, and you don't get much say in what's inside them. Fill these with your own puree or yoghurt, then wash and go again. The catch is the washing: the corners are fiddly, so look for ones that open fully or zip flat rather than the narrow-necked styles.

Food Bottle

Feeding puree on a pram walk with a bowl in one hand ends exactly how you'd expect. Squeeze the bottle and the puree comes through a spoon on the end, so it's one hand, no lid, nothing to balance. Niche, and the mums who use them use them constantly.

Insulated Food Jar

Warm bolognese at the park in July, cold yoghurt at the beach in January. A mini thermos holds the temperature for hours, and preheating it with boiling water first roughly doubles how long food stays hot. It'll still be doing lunchbox duty when bub's in primary school.

Insulated Lunch Bag

Once daycare starts, you're packing food that has to survive from drop-off to afternoon tea. This is the bag that carries the lot, jar and pouches and snacks and ice brick, keeping it all cold in between. Any cooler bag you already own does the same job until then.

Snack Container

Crackers, cut fruit, and the sultanas holding your toddler's entire personality together. Any lidded container works, which is worth knowing before you buy a new one. The toddler-specific versions are just smaller, tougher and less inclined to spring open at the bottom of the bag.

Snack Cup

This is the one that survives being hurled from the pram. A soft slitted lid lets little hands reach in but keeps the crackers where they are when it goes upside down, which it will. Watching a one-year-old work out the slits for the first time is genuinely great content.

Snackle Box

Yes, it's a tackle box for snacks, and yes, the name is the best thing in this article. A compartment box you load with little bits of everything: cheese here, berries there, crackers in the corner. Peak usefulness on road trips, plane rides and picnics, and a sneaky win for fussy eaters who love a grazing board as much as the rest of us.

Washing Up

Straw cups, pouches and valves all come apart into fiddly little pieces with corners a sponge can't reach. This is the gear that gets into them.

Bottle Brush

You likely own one from bottle feeding, and it now moonlights cleaning sippy cups, pouches and the skinny corners of the food bottle. If yours has seen things, this is a fine excuse for a fresh one. Old wisdom worth keeping: one brush for milk gear, one for everything else.

Straw Cleaner

Straws grow things you cannot see until you cut one open, and you should not cut one open. Tiny skinny brushes get right through the inside of a straw cup, which nothing else in your kitchen will do. If a straw cup comes into the house, these come with it, and they're a couple of dollars.

Dishwasher Basket

Spoon tips, pouch lids, straw bits and valve pieces all fit neatly through a dishwasher rack and land on the heating element. A little cage holds the small stuff in place through the cycle, which is the difference between a full set of feeding gear and replacing half of it. Five dollars, and it earns that back the first time.

Every product here solved a real problem for a real family.

You won't know which problems are yours until you're a few weeks in and finding out what kind of eater you've got. Start small: somewhere to sit, something to serve with, something to contain the mess. Then come back to this list once you know whether you're dealing with a serene puree accepter, a committed food flinger or a toddler who has defeated the suction plate.

The shops aren't going anywhere.