6 month won’t eat finger food - wanted to do BLW?

[lostwithyou]

I started weaning my 6 month old 2 weeks ago. I did the 2 weeks of veg purées first and then wanted to start BLW until she was stable in the high chair as she still can’t sit up unaided. She is now more stable so decided to do some finger food for the past few days.
She just looks at it. Picks up something eventually, licks it and throws it on the floor. Doesn't bother trying anything else and wants out of the high chair.
She’s been like this for a couple of days now.
What do I do? I really didn’t want the faff of making purées and spoon feeding but is that the route I have to take?

Do a bit of everything. We offered finger food and did some purees and bits off our plates. Make it fun. Lots of taste. Avoid making everything sweet and avoid pre made baby snacks/meals just give whole real food. At this stage it's just tasting and having fun.

That’s baby led weaning. They explore the food first and will spend a month doing that before eating it. This book is really good and has an introduction which explains how babies approach BLW “The Baby-led Weaning Cookbook”
by Gill Rapley and Tracey Murkett. There’s a lot of mess and food waste, it’s how they learn. I also recommend following Solid Starts on Instagram.

Totally normal. Just keep offering her foods. She'll pick them up, explore them, and when she's ready she might eat a bit. She'll get there, there's no hurry. Gill Rapley's book is excellent.

It's not a race, and you don't need purees.

BLW is just a new way fad of saying that babies are offered finger food! Has been the normal way of introducing new textures for many years. Just wait and offer different food etc whenever possible.

Mine weren’t interested until they were 10 months old. They eat anything

Did you give purées or just kept offering finger foods?

The waste and mess gives me anxiety. I don’t have a dog to clean it up either!

I did BLW with two children and they all licked food.
DS was quicker to try eating it (sitting up in his aormchair bcs he was not able to sit normally in high chair).
DD took good two months to start even putting something in her mouth.
Think before they are able to fully independently sit in a high chair they are very unlikelly to really eat anything.

They are now healthy with good eating habits and lile trying new food. It just took couple of montha to get them started.

Honestly, I just think every baby is different.
Some babies take to BLW straight away, and others don't.
My 10 month old is only taking off with finger foods now. I had been so keen to do just BLW, but he had some weightloss issues and I needed to get food into him so purees it was!
All of what your baby is doing is still important though, picking up food, having a lick, feeling the textures, getting used to messy fingers, even throwing it away, it's all beneficial. Exploring flavours, helps their fine motor skills, cause and effect etc.

I didn't find purees a faff really, just blitzed up a bit of whatever I was having. Make extra and freeze it in portioned tubs, pop it out whenever you need.

I still offered finger foods to let him explore. I then found feeding him his puree first so he wasn't too hungry really helped him be open to trying finger foods. I could see he had no patience for finger foods because it took too long to be satisfied😂 He wasn't getting the self feeding part so then I held the food up to his mouth and he'd bite it with me holding, realise it was good and then take over. Then finally, modelling it with him really helped. Eat your food with your hands instead of cutlery. He started copying me once I did that.

I definitely feel he wasn't ready for it at 6 months but loving it now. My biggest tip is to block BLW on social media because it made me feel like I was doing something really wrong by pureeing😂 Follow baby's lead 😊

We did purées spoon fed as we didn’t want the mess of blw. It was easy and straightforward - they grew up eating anything and everything. No fussy messy eaters in our house.

I did traditional weaning i.e. purees and finger foods. At 9 months we're on chunky food and bits too. I was going back to work at 6.5 months so couldn't afford him not to eat anything for months and months as it meant pumping milk 4 times in a working day which was unsustainable. We were on 2 meals a day at 8 months and on 3 meals a day now. I give him bits of steak, chicken, broccoli, orange, you name it, as well as a slightly mashed up version of what we are having.

So not doing BLW is not some kind of failure. And not doing pure BLW doesn't mean your baby won't learn to chew and explore.

Expecting a 6 month old to pick up a food and eat enough of it to count is too much for many.

Mine wouldn’t even pick the food up. She had zero interest. She’s now ten (years) and still not food oriented. We gave up BLW. It’s fine.

Just try a mixture. I did some purée at lunch time and give some finger foods at dinner to distract her while we ate. Try to avoid waste by giving her bits from what you are cooking for yourself rather than preparing special recipes aimed at BLW.

The waste and mess is tedious. But it's relatively short lived. If you don't want to make special things separately you can just give him bits of what you're having.

Baby led weaning is about being led by the baby. If they enjoy purees then you are being led by them.

Its makes no difference long term.

I’m currently a week into weaning as well. I’ve been doing purees with a bit of finger food but not much of either is going in at the moment.

But I’ve never fully understood when people say ‘just given them some of what you’re having’ - our food would be either too heavily seasoned or not cooked soft enough?

It can take several weeks before any food food actually gets eaten.

it will be played with, squished, rubbed in hair, dropped, thrown first.

there’s no hurry just keep offering it.

I agree with PP that BLW is just what humans did for most of time. It’s not a fad, it’s just that it has been more recently popularised again after the trend of puréed foods.
But if you’re doing full on BLW then you let the child decide when to start and dictate the pace.
For my first child they were desperate to start feeding themselves ‘proper’ food before 6 months. Second child still showed no interest at 6.5 months. I kept putting very small amounts in front of her, and now at 8 months she is much more into her food.

I always did a mixture of spoon feeding and finger foods. I would do purees for breakfast and dinner and then finger foods for lunch when they got to 3 meals. I couldn’t cope with the mess 😂 and the frustration of them not actually eating anything! It’s far too early to stress about it, just keep offering, it’s all about different tastes and textures at this point, milk is still the main source of nutrition.

Sorry I know you didn't quote me but just said I'd answer with what I've been doing. For my son, I remove his portion before seasoning at the end and cook his a bit longer if needed. Get some salt free stock that's handy too. Or remove baby's portion before adding sauce if not appropriate. If too spicy use less spice at first, remove baby's from the pot and then add more for yourself. Add yoghurt to baby's portion to make less spicy etc. Doesn't work in every scenario, but that's why I always cook extra when I'm doing something that is suitable for baby. I then refrigerate or freeze and pull that out on nights when I want something that I can't make suitable for baby. I hope I explained that well but if you want to give any specific examples I'll try explain it better.

@Ketryne yeah never understood just give them what you're having either. Firstly, I don't have dinner at 4 pm. Most of it would not be appropriate for a small baby.

It all requires quite a bit of thought and work in my experience.

My experience is coloured by the fact that my baby has a dairy and egg allergy which is a pain, but still.

We never gave the baby dinner at 4 either! Quite often 5 was still too early for us so made something separately but not always.

It's only salt that you have to be careful with as a seasoning and we've never added salt to anything anyway, lots of flavours from herbs and milder spices that are all fine for babies.

Never worried about softness either. Fish, chicken, pasta, risotto, potatoes etc are all fine at the usual texture you'd have them and I say that as someone who had babies that were toothless till 13 and 11 months respectively.

On the ‘feed them what you’re eating’ if you’re doing proper BLW that’s really easy to do. You literally do just give them what you’re having. Just season your own food at the end, and they don’t need anything cooked softer than we have it. Some things you’d cut in a certain way for them (carrots in batons rather than rings for example) but you can do that the same for everyone a lot of the time. I also fed them when we ate too, never found a reason to do something different. @SunshineIdiot789 what are you eating that you don’t think is appropriate for a baby? Half the problem we have with food in this society is people thinking babies and kids need different food, they really don’t on the whole.

OP, it can take a while for them to start really eating. Letting them explore and figure it out on their own is the basis of BLW. My first did get stuck in right away, my second took a while longer and it was a bit stressful. She’s actually the ‘better’ eater now.

But surely that only works if every meal you eat is a meat/potato/veg meal, which is like 1 percent of what we have. I can’t hand my 6 month old baby who has never eaten food before some Thai chicken curry or bacon risotto (made with stock and cheese) etc. and even if I did, they’d have to be given on a spoon which surely isn’t baby led weaning. Yes some of the ingredients of those things can be prepared separately but it always seemed disingenuous to tell parents that giving babies the same as you is no extra work.

I have a 3 year old and by 8-9 months I was thinking strategically about meals and could make baby friendly versions of lots of things, adding seasoning later, saving portions etc. but I don’t know how you get through the first few weeks without the horrible veggie purées. If nothing else you have to work your way through the allergens one by one.

I’ve always assumed I must be missing something!

I’m South Asian. We add spices at the beginning of cooking to cook it off, then add the meat/protein/main ingredient.
I am not sure how that would work for BLW either 🤷🏽‍♀️

Our experience of BLW eith our first was most food on the floor for several months! If the floor is kept very clean it can be handed back. Our second ate pretty much straight away. Spices are fine for babies as long as there isn't too much chilli (they might not like it) or any added salt.