blw too good to be true?

[mum2twoloudbabies]

the books make it sound oh so wonderful and I find it all a bit too good to be true (like most of these parenting books) cynical me? noooo

I weaned dd with puree and finger food at 6mo it went well no real stresses and she certainly doesn't have a problem with food now. However, for ease I'm thinking of just blw with ds.

So come and tell me the pitfalls of BLW so that I can be prepared, did it not work for you? if it did work whats the hard bit?

[belindarose]

No pitfalls here! I'm sure there will be others with different experiences though. In our case, it went by the book (although DD did eat much more than I was expecting, no sucking or spitting out for her). She is has her fussy phases, which I'm sure is a toddler thing rather than a weaning method thing.

[blackcurrants]

Hardest part of BLW with DS (35weeks) is stopping him diving on my cake, biscuits, chips etc while we're out and about. "No, darling, look at the lovely carrots that Mum has for you" - cue mad scrabbling for the cake as I scoff away. He's worked out that while I'm eating, he's eating! :)


In seriousness, though - I've not met with any pitfalls yet. DS was less interested the week he had a cold, but friends who are spoonfeeding tell me similar tales. The hardest part was sitting back, letting him make a mess and faff around a bit, and trusting he'd find his face eventually.
He always does! :)

[charitygirl]

The only pitfall was my paranoia about choking in the first couple of weeks. And he never choked - only gagged. LOVE BLW - cant wait to do it again with No 2.

[Woodlands]

For me it was that my baby got incredibly impatient that he wanted to try all these foods, but his manual dexterity hadn't yet caught up. We have ended up doing a fair amount of spoon-feeding, but that's what he likes. He has got much better with finger foods recently (8.5 months).

[yama]

No pitfalls here either. So much easier than the puree and finger food approach taken with dc1. Ds eats everything put on his tray.

It took about two days to learn how to swallow what he had chewed.

[FetchezLaVache]

No pitfalls here either! Like blackcurrants, i noticed DS was less interested when he had a cold, but that would probably have been the case with purée too. It's so easy and seems to have helped him develop a real love of food.

[HumphreyCobbler]

I loved it but it is messy.

[BertieBotts]

It's fab - no pitfalls here either. Though don't labour too heavily on the delusion that weaning method determines how fussy they will be (or not) - DS is still fussy and unwilling to try new things now, even though he loved BLW from the start.

[TheOldestCat]

Didn't work for us - DS started eating some at about 8 or 9 months, but has since regressed and doesn't eat much (at 13 months). I've not been terribly worried since he's on the 98th percentile and growing like a very growy thing. But I do wish I'd done purees etc as I do fret that he's not getting enough vitamins etc (am giving him vit drops, although doctor says I should put him on formula - I'm BF).

I think we're in the minority with this as most people seem to love BLW.

[LBsBongers]

The major pitfall I found was that without thinking about it I tended to give food that was quite dry and easy to hold and grasp at. This has led to him becoming phobic about wet, sloppy or mixed up food.

I appreciate the philosophy behind BLW ie that it's important the child remains in control of what they eat and is aloud time to play and explore foods. I would say however there is a place for spoons even if it's just loading them ( which is I believe still considered BLW).

You need to ensure that your child is exposed o a range of textures as well as tastes

[pookamoo]

We loved it in this house, but DH and I kept having to remind ourselves not to worry that DD was "getting enough" to eat. She didn't really take off until she was about a year old.

We will definitely be doing it again.

[surelynotnormal]

My DD2 refuses to be spoon fed. I find it infuriating!

Easier to keep a bit of our meal and blitz it or mash it with a spoon and feed her than it is to put a bowl of bolognese, or mashed potato, or lentil dahl in front of her and expect her to get much of it in her mouth.

HOW do you BLWers deal with sloppy food? Pleeease? If I give her a loaded spoon she throws it away. Tonight I had to make a separate meal of boiled sliced potato, hard boiled sliced egg, cucumber and tomatos because she refused to eat the stew her sister was eating.

I THOUGHT BLW WAS SUPPOSED TO BE EASIER!!

[TheOldestCat]

Ah, I wonder if we've done the same thing LBsBongers. DS will eat banana and toast etc and will tolerate being spoonfed yogurt and readybrek. But he isn't keen on mixed-up stuff.

[Pidgywidge]

We're a month in and I'm absolutely loving it!

The hardest part at the start was the gagging, there was one day I though my nerves couldn't take any more! But once I let her get on with it (on standby of course with a beady eye in case it turned to choking), I realised it was just part of the learning experience, I stopped interfering and then it reduced very quickly. Now she hardly ever gags, feeds herself brilliantly and she's nearly 7 mo.

Re the loaded spoons, we do that with yoghurt and sloppy stuff. I also spread sloppy stuff (e.g. pureed veg) on rice cakes and pitta bread. DD eats the bread and sucks it off the rice cakes.

I don't find it time consuming as I spend the time clearing up/prepping the next meal/catching up on post - it's made us eat more healthily too.

Some pureeing mum friends came round yesterday and watched her eat lunch - they were completely gobsmacked! Definitely a fan here!

[Fumblina]

the mess, oh dear god the mess.

DD learned very quickly that it is annoying fun to just throw stuff on the floor and maliciously flick wave the loaded spoons about

It is pretty cool though...

[Woodlands]

Oh yeah, my DS doesn't like having more than one thing on his high chair tray at once. If you put, say, a bit of roast potato, a stick of roasted parsnip and a strip of chicken on there, he'll throw two of them off before eating one. So it's hard to let him have a choice of what to eat - I have to just give him one thing at a time.

I tend to give him a lot of stuff on bread - for example, for tea this evening he had tuna mixed with greek yoghurt and sweetcorn spread on bread. He loves bread but I do worry about the salt content.

I also find that it's hard to feed him at our mealtimes, and what we have often isn't suitable for him. For example we don't eat our evening meal until 8.30-9pm, as we start cooking after the baby is in bed. We could possibly eat a bit earlier but DS is ready for his tea by 5.30pm. We try to save him some of our evening meal for his lunch the next day, but it's often not suitable - too salty/processed/spicy/whatever. Plus he's screeching for lunch by 12pm, again, too early for me.

[notcitrus]

My ds took to some things straight away (bread, chips, banana, sticks of roast pork) but when I was eating yoghurt or cereal he made it clear he wanted some, followed by demanding some purees when he saw other babies eating them.

I figured if it was 'baby-led' weaning, and he wanted purees, he should be offered them. In practice I just mashed some of my food with a fork and tried letting him feed himself but he made it clear it would be so much faster if I helped and I could damn well make myself useful. :)

He ate pretty much anything until 18mo, when he decided to become a fussy toddler...

[Bumperlicioso]

I'm actually spoonfeeding more than I did with DD1. DD1 took really well to BLW (she is in the BLW book!) but has turned out pretty fussy (not sure if BLW has anything to do with it). With DD2 we are being a bit less purist about it and spoon feeding a bit more as, like another poster, her appetite is more advanced than her dexterity and I am keen for her to stop waking in the night so much. But she is still mostly eating what we are eating. I hope she gets the hang of it more soon, spoon feeding bores me!

[blackcurrants]

regarding sloppy food - we tend to mix it up a bit. Dahls etc get slapped on a no-salt rice cake and sucked or licked off. Stew gets picked apart - he eats the lumpy bits and smears the sloppy bits into the highchair. We eat greek yoghurt, the thicker kind, and he gets that with bits of puffed wheat in, so he picks it up in clumps IYSWIM. But yes, he's probably getting less sloppy food than he would if we spoonfed.

He absolutely LOVES reddy brek and will very very carefully put the pre-loaded spoon into his mouth rather than flinging it about. So I know he can do it - cos it does it with his fave pudding option. Hence I try to be patient about other stuff. DS loves sucking bolognese sauce off pasta twirls, for example, but couldn't really pick them up confidently until this last month. Now it's one of his favourite things. Lots of sauce gets slapped with a full open palm, then licked off his fingers. I suppose we don't eat lots of sloppy food anyway, so it doesn't seem to matter for us. He does flick and fling pre-loaded spoons around, but breadstick-as-dipper works well, as does cut up bits of baguette, etc. They get dipped in sauces and sucked and gummed to death very happily.

[Bumperlicioso]

Haven't tried this yet but a friend of mine makes sticky rice balls. They could be used for dipping in curries, soup etc.

[mum2twoloudbabies]

this is all very interesting.

TheSecondComing this was my concern I don't have time to hang around either however I can see that regardless of how we go he will still end up with more solid food than purees as he'll more than likely want to copy his sister.

[BertieBotts]

TOC, I don't know that food refusal is linked to BLW - I experienced it (did BLW) but so did a friend who didn't do BLW at all. I was also told to cut down BF, or give vitamin drops. Cutting down bf never worked - just made him more upset and likely to refuse food. Eventually at about 22 months he just suddenly took to food and started eating loads. Throughout all this time he never acted as though he was malnourished - he ran about like a mad thing, learned to walk, picked up loads of words, was a typical not-quite-toddler. He looked small, but he's always been small. He didn't look skinny.

One thing I found really helpful was talking to my LLL leader, they lent me [http://www.lllgbbooks.co.uk/product/359/toddlers_and_food_-_pad_of_50/default.aspx this information sheet] produced by LLL (so properly researched etc) - you can order one for 75p - and there were some interesting things in there like the amount your baby eats will drop at about a year - whether they drop food intake or milk feeds. (And either is fine, although I don't know if bottlefeeding whether it means you should stick with formula) This is because growth is so much faster in the first year, suddenly they don't need as much because they aren't sustaining the same rapid growth rate. The leaflet also had stuff about portion sizes and the nutritional content of bmilk. It just highlighted the difference which was bothering me - some babies will eat 2 bananas + cereal for breakfast, whereas mine would eat possibly half of one, if that. He'll eat 2 in a row now so don't worry - they catch up. :)

On other points - yes I suppose a downside of BLW is that with purees, you control pretty much the speed at which it goes, so if you want them only having 2 milk feeds a day at a year, you can do that. It's subjective though - it won't be a downside to everyone.

[BertieBotts]

this information sheet