BLW and a hungry baby - what if their appetite outwieghs their dexterity

[Bumperlicioso]

I am a complete BLW evangelist, I loved it with DD1 and she is even in the BLW book! However I am struggling a bit with DD2. Started weaning a bit earlier than you are supposed to (5.5 mo) with a bit of porridge as I hoped it would help her sleep (it didn't). But she is quite a hungry baby. She isn't big, but if I spoon feed her she will wolf food down, much more so than if left to her own devices.

With DD1 pretty much the only thing I spoon fed her was yoghurt (my tolerance for mess had its limits!), however DD2 is so impatient and hungry I find I am spoon feeding her a lot more, along with giving her finger foods. She is eating what we are eating, e.g. tonight was curry, but she didn't make any effort to feed herself, though she will a little bit with a pre loaded spoon. TBH I'm not that keen to be spoon feeding her, it means my dinner is going cold! But she is definitely hungry and growls when she doesn't have food in her hand/mouth. She will happily feed herself with actual finger food, but not so much with sloppier foods, whereas DD1 just got stuck in.

I appreciate the advice might be 'well just spoon feed her then' but I would be interested in the take BLWers have on this.

No advice but am in exactly the same situation. Was a total BLW purist with my dd and it was great. My ds is now just 6 months and seems very hungry. He actually cries for food and is like a little bird when I approach with spoon. After 30 mins BLW dinner, he is still ravenous. Feeling a bit unsure.

I guess the theory is their milk intake only dips by the amount they can feed themselves - if you start spoon feeding then they take less milk and wouldn't be able to fill the gap from what they can feed themselves.

I suppose I'm not a BLW purist (I spoon porridge as well as yogurt) but if your baby wants spoon feeding, then to me that is being led by your baby. I know plenty would probably disagree with me though.

My take on it is that as long as you are not forcing anything into their mouth and following your babies wants, if they are opening their mouth and clearly wanting help then just go for it.

I thought BLW was great, but if we were having soup or the like then I'd feed them some and give them the bread or whatever we were having with it to pick up themselves.

I wish I was in your shoes Bumper - DD's the same age and having BLWed DS I was happy to do the same again. She's a hungry beastie though and finds it all so frustrating, she attacks whatever she's given with vigour. Only problem is she can't manage to bite and chew with much success (you know what they're like) but refuses a spoon unless she's holding it (in which case it mush be turned over and over and examined with suspicion and cross-eyed concentration before she'll eventually put the wrong end in her mouth. Driving me bonkers!

This too shall pass ....

In your position I would offer loaded spoons I think, interspersed with help :)

Oh yes, DD likes the wrong end of the spoon! I guess I'll just continue to spoon feed her. I just hope she hurries up and starts doing it herself!

Oh just give them some on a spoon for Christ's sake. Spoons are not the work of the devil. Your child will still wean quite happily.

I've found with the 'wrong end of the spoon' conundrum that DD gets it right if she picks the spoon up off the table, rather than me handing it to her.

I spoonfeed runny stuff, and she feeds herself everything else. I'm with tricymalixy though, provided I'm not forcing a spoon into her mouth and she's opening it for food then she clearly wants to eat.

I think the goal of BLW is helping your baby to love good food. So do what makes your baby happy, which may temporarily be spooning some food in. Your DD may decide next week that she'd rather handle the spoon herself thanks Mum. Or she may not get it for a few months yet. So long as she's happy it really doesn't matter.

At 6m DD would never allow a spoon to be placed into her mouth so we had to go down the BLW route. At 11m she has decided that having stuff spooned into her mouth is completely hilarious and will sit in her highchair waiting to be fed like a baby and then giggle which is a royal pain in the arse. I'm not sure what the relevance of this is beyond the fact that the only thing I am confident of after 11m of baby-wrangling is that small humans are a bit weird and should not be taken too seriously.

"Oh just give them some on a spoon for Christ's sake. Spoons are not the work of the devil. Your child will still wean quite happily."

Entirely agree.

I love this advice here. GOt told off by an acquaintance for saying I was 'somewhere in the middle' with weaning. You either BLW or PLW she says there is no half and half, there is no middle ground blah blah blah. Then wrote a blog post about how women who say half-and-half or somewhere in the middle are ashamed of their choices. Then when I pointed out I'm not ashamed of my choices she and her H both jumped on me.

and I realise I have not contributed anything real to the thread, just had a little rant sorry as you were ladies.

I do not think spoons are the work of the devil, I do not have a problem with spoon feeding beyond my own laziness. And as you will read in my OP I am spoon feeding her. BLW worked really well with DD1 and I was wondering why I wasn't having as much success with DD2, and what I really wanted to know was how my conundrum fit in with the BLW concept. But thanks for your helpful advice.

QoD, that's hilarious. Nothing like a blogger who knows it all, eh?

Bumper, I wasn't meaning to be horrible, I just thought the post I quoted was funny and reflected my own thoughts. I can't help with your original query, I guess. To be honest (and I appreciate this is just my POV) I just can't really see why it matters much whether every aspect of the way one weans fits in with a concept or not. It seems like sometimes people get so involved with the theory of BLW they can't see the wood for the trees, type of thing - I have seen that on threads in the past. But I am honestly not implying that you are that way, and no personal nastiness was intended. Sorry for unhelpfulness :)

Same here but DC2 was a DS, not that I think it makes any difference - I tend to hold the spoon for him, if I hold it near him he puts his mouth on the spoon while I hold it, so he's still in control of how much is going in and moving it around his mouth, but he's still getting a reasonable amount in him. Sometimes he wants to hold the spoon himself, others he gets cross so I sort of give him the choice. I don't actually put it in his mouth for him, if that makes sense.

Good grief, Queen

I think it's such a shame that weaning has become almost politicised. It's ridiculous.

Sorry, I don't see the problem. What is so wrong with giving your child food from a spoon if it means that they are satisified? It makes no sense to have a hungry baby, surely you can see that.

I have two DDs. DD1 (5.5yo) was weaned in the trad way at about 5 months. She is an okay eater now, but can be very picky about certain things.

DD2 is 12 and a bit months. She is a big girl. I had planned to BLW her, but when the time came, I knew that her hunger would outweigh her ability to feed herself enough, so I started off spoon feeding but made sure we introduced finger foods earlier and more regularly than we did with DD1. She eats anything and everything, even despite still having no teeth! She is a far better eater than DD1 is or was.

What I'm saying is that you have to adapt to the child, instead of having tunnel vision.

Don't worry DM I was just being sniffy at NormanTebbit's post. Obviously I know it's ok to spoon feed, it just wasn't I intended as I was so pleased at the ease of doing BLW with dd1, I could just let her get on with it. I was really just wondering how people who don't spoon feed at all would resolve it. I'll just keep going with whatever suits dd2, even if that means spoon feeding while my food gets cold

How it worked with DS is that he had no idea that food was supposed to cure hunger, so didn't drop any milk feeds until he was about 9 mo. Up until then, he gradually realised that food tasted nice and that if he was feeling a little bit peckish, the food also cured that, so came to the 'solid food curing hunger' solution on his own at about 9 months. That's when he decided this food business was a lot more interesting than milk, so started dropping milk feeds. It meant that he was never 'hungry' at a meal time initially, so there was no guilt about him needing to eat a particular ammount at any particular mealtime to fill him up. By the time he was hungry at mealtimes (because he was dropping milk), he had had enough practice to manage the vast majority of foods with his hands.
FWIW, he didn't like doing any sort of licking or sucking of his fingers, even now he's nearly 16mo, which did make sloppy food a bit more of a challenge, but then I wasn't anti-spoonfeeding, so did spoonfeed yoghurt and porridge. The aspect I embraced from BLW was not the no spoonfeeding, as I don't have a problem with that if the baby wants to be fed that way, I just didn't want to give him any foods that I would be unprepared to eat, i.e. any of the strange concoctions suggested in a list of purees I was given by HV when he was about 4 months old. I have no desire to eat pureed spinach and banana (I'm not kidding, there was a recipe!), so didn't want to give DS the same. No problem at all with spoonfeeding sloppy stuff though, given that he wouldn't get his hands in there and do it himself.

We did a bit of a mixture with DD. Started on a mix of finger foods for her to tackle plus us spooning porridge etc. while she played with her own spoon, loading spoons and giving them to her - she quickly got the hang of it, and as Wildhood says, we made sure that she had 'control' of the level of our assistance if you see what I mean. Lots depended on the mood she was in, and we definitely had times when she was clearly hungry or tired and there was a lot more willing spoonfeeding than wilful playing. It felt like a good balance, we felt that the crucial thing was that mealtimes were social, fun and supportive - she wasn't left frustrated when her hunger was clearly outstripping her abilities. Surely that's a pretty negative way to operate - putting the label before the baby!

She's 15 months now and is entirely independent at mealtimes, and loves them.

I think if you're responding to what she needs every time, you'll teach her to love her mealtimes, which is surely the overall aim.

Some people just aren't reading my posts. I don't have tunnel vision. I am not starving my daughter. However there is a school of though, to which I have always subscribed, that self feeding is enough for a baby and I just want to know how others who subscribe to the same school of though reconcile this.

Aha, apologies if I have misunderstood. My response to that would be that from most of the experiences posted here, mine included, it would seem that there IS an issue with this school of thought - that although technically self-feeding might be enough for the baby in terms of nutrition (as presumably they would then make up the difference with milk), the downside is that a percentage of less dextrous/very hungry babies might end up frustrated and dissilusioned with the BLW experience.

I would think that the vast majority of BLWs would reconcile this with a common-sense approach, that the main aim of the process is to make the baby happy, confident and independent with food. So if a bit of spooning is what the baby is 'leading' you to do, that should happen alongside the encouragement to take control, experiment etc.

Like anything else, I wouldn't refuse DD help if she was asking for it.

Sorry, cross posts that wasn't directed at you shoutyhamster. I'm having a bad mumsnet day, I just need to log off and stop being so sensitive!

I worked on the basis that DD would make up with milk whatever she didn't get through food. For the first few months she appeared to get VERY little in (although from the nappies, something got through) and has only recently improved.

Any of the few attempts made to spoon feed DD have been met with either a hand yoinking the spoon off me, or a firmly sealed mouth.

The refusal of her to let me feed her at all was her way of telling me she WAS getting enough. Otherwise she would have allowed me to do so (like your DD does)

Thanks for all the helpful messages. It's given me food for thought and I'll not get hung up about how she feeds. Now if only it would help her sleep through...