to feel like I have failed because I want to give up on baby led weaning?

[honeytea]

Ds is 7 months old and he is doing reaply well with his eating. We waited till 6 months before we offered him food and we have been following blw. He has been eating the same food as us and actually managing to chew strips of chicken and trying lots of vegetables, he hardly ever gaggs and he seems to really enjoy food.

The only problem we have is the mess, I am not the greatest cleaner I have been spending 15-20 minutes aftereeach meal cleaning the highchair, floor, walls, baby, me. Ds can crawl and has just started pulling himself up and cruising around the furniture so I can't just leave him sat on the floor with a toy whilst I clean up anymore.

We are staying at my mums and last night we got back from a day out really late. I bought a pouch of baby food and gave it to ds on a spoon, he ate it with no problem andthe clean up took about 20 seconds.

I feel like I am letting ds down if we give up on blw as he is doing so well, but I don't want to waste quality time with him cleaning up avoidable mess. I like the idea of ds having control of what and how much he eats, I really want to help him develop a healthy relationship with food as its something I have struggled with.

[exoticfruits]

It depends entirely on your DC - DS3 loved everything, including stinky cheese, DS2 very conservative tastes and suspicious of the new- 20 months apart, same foods, same methods.

[FullOfChoc]

It is messy! In summer I put the highchair outside!

I also bought a cheap shower curtain and spread that out under the high chair to try and save the carpet.

[Squitten]

Do what you like OP - they all learn to eat in the end. My BLW is the better eater but my hideously fussy puree-weaned child did eventually get there!

However, do bear in mind that whether you start with a spoon or a chicken leg, they all have to learn to feed themselves eventually and that is going to be messy whatever you do. My eldest is nearly 5 and can now be trusted not to destroy his clothes and the table during a meal. My 2.5yr old is a chaos zone.

So in many ways you do just have to get over your hatred of the mess. It will come no matter what!

[RubyThePirate]

This is 'the small stuff'. Don't sweat it

If you're both happy, it'll be fine.

I'm pretty sure I wasn't BLW'd myself and I love food in a healthy way (and use a knife and fork and everything).

[Treagues]

"I did Annabel Karmel" - doesn't this just mean "I consulted a cookbook written by Annabel Karmel"?

[LeBFG]

To whoever was asking, there is one peer reviewed paper comparing BLW with standard weaning. They found NO DIFFERENCE in fussiness at about 2/3 years old. There were VERY SLIGHT differences in favoured food groups. There was a difference in BMI between the groups (BLW were lighter - some underweight, other group heavier, some overweight) which led to everyone saying BLW babies were healthier (less likely to get obese) but after looking at the paper, the BLWers were also far more likely to be bf and bf for much longer (think 20 sommat like that). So it was clear as crystal why the BLWer were lighter .

[CornflowerB]

Thanks LeBGF, that's interesting.
It does seem a shame that BLW has come yet another stick mothers to beat themselves with...

[CornflowerB]

...become yet another stick for mothers to beat themselves with

[UniqueAndAmazing]

sorry Cornflower - i didn't mean the thesis was on the website, but that the website was the website she started.
(information about BLW on that website, and where to find the research, rather than it being on that website)

[UniqueAndAmazing]

The thing is, I don't understand why you need to do purees at all.

okay, use a spoon - it doesn't matter, just to get the food into their mouth, but it doesn't have to be pureed.

Put the normal chunks of food onto a spoon, put the spoon into their mouth, let them move it around with their teeth/gums/tongue and explore it.
I don't see how purees make it easier to feed a baby.

[Treagues]

I eat soup
mashed potato
yogurt etc

We sometimes eat what is essentially pureed food as part of a normal and healthy diet. If we agree that nobody should eat the same kind of food all the time...well what exactly is wrong with puree?

[UniqueAndAmazing]

but you're not supposed to start before 6 months anymore.

[UniqueAndAmazing]

Treagues - yes, I get that, I meant why puree things that aren't meant to be pureed?

[Sparklingbrook]

Really Unique? Something else has changed since 1999. I weaned mine when the HV told me to, probably about 5 months.

[Viviennemary]

I agree with a mixture of both. I can't see the point of letting babies do this self feeding thing and more ends up in their hair and all over the floor than actually inside them. I don't mind a bit of mess but there are limits.

[parkin2010]

To be honest I had a baby 2.5 years ago and never noticed this term baby led weaning. Since then it seems to have become the new fad and something daft women get worked up and competitive about. Pouches, giving them bits of food = it doesn't matter. Speaking as someone who didn't know about it, my toddler eats when she is hungry and hss a good diet, please don't worry.

[Treagues]

I can't think of that many foods which 'aren't meant to be' pureed: I mean, you can have pretty much any fruit in puree form as sauce or dessert
Pureed fish and meat: pate, meat paste, mousse
Any old veg can become soup
Grains and pulses become dhal, soups, porridge, congee, creme de riz
Bread sauce

I'm being slightly silly but to make the point that the idea of 'baby food' is a completely artificial construction anyway. What we are talking about is food and the idea of telling parents that a particular form of food they are familiar with and enjoy is not suitable for babies for some spurious reason is ridiculous.

[bigkidsdidit]

Yy Miaow

I remember someone saying they gave their child porridge by baking it into strips the child could pick up

Utterly daft. Just feed it some porridge

[bigkidsdidit]

Unique recent data suggests weaning at six months vs five increases diabetes risk

ref

As an aside, I think if we swing back to five months ish BLW will fall out of favour

[UniqueAndAmazing]

Treagues - i think you're being deliberately obtuse now.

you know what I mean.
if you eat pasta with veg, the only part that's liquid is the sauce - you eat the rest as solid.
same with roast dinner - you mash the potatoes, but everything else is solid lumps of food.

I've never fed DD mashed/pureed anything that I wasn't eating as mash or puree.

re: before 6 months - The guidelines in the UK are 6 months unless you've got reasons/advice to start before 6 months (and a lot of "advice" to start before 6 months is outdated medical professionals who don't know the 6month guidelines) the reason that it's 6 months is because that's when the gut is sufficiently developed to digest non-milk food, and that it's also a time when the motor skills of the baby are developed enough that they can handle the food (in their mouths as well as in their hands)
I see no sense of starting before 6 months - why hurry it? Why is it so important to people to get their babies (or their grandchildren ) onto "solids" when they just start with purees anyway? which do nothing at all for the baby's development except give them a different flavour. (they already know how to swallow from milk!)
Purees don't help with chewing or manipulation or tongue movement (which all can help towards development of speech), and the first things you tend to puree are foods that have very little nutritional value anyway.
Children are much less likely to choke on food if they have always been given the opportunity to manipulate their own food in their own mouths. (give a child an apple puree so they get used to the apple taste, then give them a piece of apple - why wouldn't they automatically think that they're supposed to just straight swallow it without chewing first?)

[UniqueAndAmazing]

"the idea of telling parents that a particular form of food they are familiar with and enjoy is not suitable for babies"

so that means that purees are bad then?

[UniqueAndAmazing]

bigkids - i give my DD the bowl and the spoon - the idea of baking the porridge to make it pickupable is because there's an assumption that a spoon is too difficult to manoeuvre.

I have always just given DD the spoon as well. Pre-loaded if needs be to give her the idea, but I didn't feed her with it in the same way.

when she was about 15 months, we got a parenting email from Boots saying that she would be thinking about starting to use a spoon herself now - at that point, she'd been using a spoon by herself with very high % success for about 6 months.

[bigkidsdidit]

I did the same, either spoon fed him or gave him the spoon, depending n time or how hungry he was. Obviously you are not one of the more obsessed of the BLWers!