Ok since we are on food, lets talk about Baby Led Weaning - isnt it just ANOTHER set of rules for mums to fail at?

[Enid]

Because by NOT following baby led weaning I don't have any angst about what to give dd3 for breakfast. I give her porridge, I spoon it in, she eats it, end of. I mean, sorry, but porridge pancakes!? Why bother?

I liked the idea of it but there seem to be toooooooooooo many threads asking for advice and what to feed your baby etc - this suggests to me that it is just ANOTHER thing to angst over. I mean, if I am giving dd1 and 2 shepherds pie with peas, how am I supposed to feed it to dd3? so she gets the same thing mashed up and spooned in, hurrah.

here you go, filly...

The only obvious things we could think of were: Couscous and Rice (unless you overcook both so they go clumpy) Rice Pudding, Lentils, Cottage Cheese, Yoghurt, Peas, Sultanas.

And I should stress that once the babies' fine motor control develops they can eat these things with no problem. (In our case, by 8 months-ish).

Our casserole is taking longer than expected so DD is having some puy lentils with sage and onion that i keep for emergencies in the freezer, having eaten haddock poached in milk and butter with peas and potatoes for lunch. i'll probably give her some cheese and green beans as well. oh and she's also had some home-made popcorn as a snack today, thanks to HumphreyCushion reminding me about the delights of popcorn on the food snob thread.

am trying to recall why I actually did feed my two with a spoon. I know I did at least once cos I have a photo of ds feeding dd...

I do remember being very concerned about getting them used to tastes. Here's an example. In my super duper blender I can blend up an apple, with skin. To prepare it for blw I would need to poach it or similar. Ditto carrots and other food that is a choking hazard. They taste totally different when cooked, IMO.

I do feel that getting them used to tastes is the real purpose of weaning.

(oh and certainly don't feel like you need to justify yourself at all here...we are really arguing around the margins anyway, aren't we? I think we agree that Finger Foods Are Good wink] . Its just I wamt them to experience as many tastes as possible in that first year, and not be limited by motor skills)

Sorry ladies - I had to disappear for a bit, but looks like the wonderful Aitch (and Blackalice) has answered your questions.

Just to add, I give DD bought soup when I haven't time to prepare anything, and it's usually stuff that's pureed right down (we don't have a lot of choice as DD is milk intolerant and most soups contain milk), but I just shove in some big chunks of bread and they absorb the liquid just fine, and she sort of sucks the soup out of them before eating the bread itself.

Rice is pretty much the only thing that I've avoided giving since doing blw, unless it's with something very thick and sticky which will mat the rice together.

Hello all, I've been wondering what BLW is all about, not that it's directly relevant to me as it's 22 years since I weaned my first child and more than a decade since I weaned the last. Anyway, I am now much reassured that I haven't missed out on some newly identified significant developmental process!

Although I didn't call it BLW I stuck to the baby-led approach from the get go. I was very clear that I didn't want to install any weird relationship with food in my kids (clean that plate... NO! NO! NO!) so I took a pretty relaxed approach to the whole thing. It seemed like common sense that a hungry baby will eat, and that whatever method the baby used to get food into mouth was OK, and that the baby would learn directly from how I handled mealtimes. Yes it was wonderfully messy and exquisitely sensory, and I frequently had to take the high chair into garden and hose it down (old fashioned wooden chair) but we never had any fuss over food, then or subsequently.

Yes, my kids have developed preferences, and later went off some things that they loved as babies (mushrooms for some bizarre reason) and during the teenage years ds2 got a bit fussy about what he called 'fancy' food but that was as much a response to peer pressure as anything else. ds1 also went off very hot or spicy food, but only after a trip to India when he was 15, he also declared himself vegetarian at around 6 whereas ds2 is a dedicated meat lover so.... I just rolled with the changes.

Just rambling really, as the most important thing (in this as in many things) seems to be one of attitude rather than detail. If the parent is relaxed and comfortable around food, and pays attention to what the baby communicates (even a spoon-fed baby will resolutely close its mouth when enough is enough, until trained to do otherwise), then that's what the baby learns.

And Aitch even beat me with the mention of rice as I was too slow typing my message!

spot on re attitude garcia. think thats the key really. take it on that we are all agreed?

carrots and apple are on my list of Foods That Must Be Cooked. some people hand them over raw but i'm too feart. (actually dd does now eat apple but she scrapes at the whole fruit, skin and all, so she can't get much off at a time).

she's just gone into the bath now (dh in charge) after some puy lentils mixed with casserole gravy, mushrooms and peas. what is interesting now is that where a month ago she would have eaten such a 'wet' meal slowly with her hands she now does a mix of hands and spoon, with me scooping up food and her taking the spoon and eating it. we tend to leave a couple of spoons on the table nowadays so she can give them a try.

she also tries to scoop it up herself but she's not brilliant at that yet and finds it quite frustrating so if it's that sort of a meal (maybe 2x a week) i help her out.

i'm not anti-spoons as such, just anti-spooning, if you get my drift? and everything is subject to change, of course, thta's why i started the blog, to chart what happened. for example she used to love broccoli, decided she hated it, now she loves it again. but because it's not mixed up in a puree it really is not a hassle to say 'good, more for us' and for me and DH to eat it.

(that's what my mum used to day to us... i can't believe i'm now employing the same techniques with my own dd )

agreed, filly.

and cheerygarcia, we have on occasion stuck our plastic ikea highchair into the shower cubicle and hosed it down...

the sensory thing is also interesting... when franny starts talking about how plastic all feels much the same regardless of whether it's a train or a spinning top i do find myself thinking that BLW has something in common with her heuristic play theories, in that the food is not all the same texture.

yes agree with you re attitude. think relaxed attitude is the main thing. Spoon feeding is not a no-no for me, it was an occasional thing to give them an additional taste really.

I would never feed my kids something I wouldn't eat. So like I say, my preferance would be to spoon feed them stuff they couldn't yet eat to acclimatise them to the taste but if they didn't eat it...I would step into the breach . I also introduced spices/seasoning easrly so they had apple and cinam,on. very mild yoghuty curry etc from as soon as they were weaned. I do feel that a range of strong tastes in weaning is an insurance againsy fussy eating to some extebt.

oh re the couscous and rice...my kids had both as finger foods from an early age-around 7/8 months (I weaned at around 6/5 months and it took both kids a while to get to grips with food). but mixed in with slops.

i think it's quite funny all the comments about blw being something new and fancy and just a new set of rules to follow!

it's sooo the opposite. blw means you aren't buying into the whole marketing around puree weaning. blw means you have no book to follow, no rules. just about the only info on it is gill rapley's study and aitch's blog, other than forums like this.

So if more parents breastfed exclusively and then did BLW until the child was eating normally, think of how much revenue the baby milk/food industry would be losing!

No wonder they like everyone to believe it's difficult and a hassle.

exactamundo greeny!

blw means you don't buy any of the paraphenalia with puree weaning. you just skip all that.

oh dear annabel karmel..

um

didn't buy any paraphrenalia for our excursions into pureeing. We had a blender.

there is a brilliant radio clip of annabel karmel choking on her chips during a radio debate with the blessed gill rapley on woman's hour on R4. very funny, as GR is totally calm and unthreatened by her insistence that babies are too stupid to eat real food (hhhm, maybe she didn't say exactly that...) and will choke to death on a lychee stone.

DD is asleep now after her lentil blowout... i'm going to have a guinness to celebrate surviving the root canal treatment (which i thought deserved rather more sympathy than i got, although thank you blackalice for caring...)

and filly... face it, you baby-led weaned your children. you did, you know...

I did this will all 4 of mine - I had never heard of baby led weaning - I was just too lazy(or preoccupied with the other children) to sit there spooning it in. Anything is possible - porridge, weetabix, rice. It is messy.

But I don't see the problem with spoon feeding - surely the baby just refuses to eat if it's not hungry, or if it doesn't want to eat. You can't force a baby to eat can you?

(oh my god I feel like one of those people who gives an occasional bottle)

aaaargh h you had root canal?

oh god why didn't you say?

(did you?)

{{{{sympathy}}}

{{{{sympathy}}}

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oh ps surely you can blw and also bottle feed?

filly have you seen annabel's new range at boots?

£16 for a hand blender

i know that not everyone buys all the baby rice, ice cube trays, mini blenders, jars of puree, cans of puree, packets of powdered puree, but the point is that people are lulled into pureeing cos that's what's out there. a lot of mums wouldn't know there is any other way to do it. a lot of mums think a baby needs teeth to eat a peach. a lot of mums think a 6 month old would choke on potato in solid form as they would eat so they mash it down for them or buy a can of it.

there isn't really anything to 'sell' for blw...who am i kidding..it'll come...

My god, what a pile of overpriced crap

i did say, in CAPITALS. but only blackalice noticed...

there actually isn't a problem with formula and BLW but Gill Rapley couldn't really focus on FF for various reasons. i think it'll be easier for the mother to get her head round blw if she's been ffing on demand, however, as you do have to go with the flow a fair bit. but of course i might be wrong, i only know what i've experienced.

GR has popped up on my blog in support of ffers who want to do BLW, and she explained that she has to say the bit about ffers asking their HV just to keep things academically straight.

and pollyanna, as i said below i agree with you about the spoons with regard to my dd, but i believe i have seen friends of mine 'shovel' food into children who appeared to be refusing it. however, that may have been the 'dance' that that parent and child had set up for feeding, so again i can't really say.

tbh on the blog i wanted a punchy strapline, so i wrote 'two mothers, two babies, no spoons' cos i thought that fitted the bill. actually my friend used spoons from day one, which she wrote about, and i started giving them to dd from about 7 months.

i principally agree with dizzybint, esp with regard to enid's OP... there really aren't any rules, in fact there is hardly any information at all on it. that's one of the reasons i like it.

sorry about your root canal..come to the bar later for more guiness and sympathy..

DD is formula fed and we do BLW...never considered it would be an issue..those pics of AK with a pretty ribbon in her hair and her fancy shmancy new range of things make me CROSS!!!

except didn;t know it was BLW at first!!

blimey I am amazed that you all care so much about this...
to me, the control thing is really key, that dd2 gets to control what she eats and when to stop. I just hate to see that thing where parents are jamming in "just one more spoonful". I saw a couple the other day, and the mother was shoving fruit puree in the baby's mouth and the baby was distraught and wailing so mush that the father had to pick him up and jiggle him around and she was still shoving the spoon in his mouth every time he opened it to cry and then she followed it up wia yoghurt... I kind of understand what she was doing - probably she had an idea in her head that the baby must eat X otherwise he wouldn't sleep later, but I think it is that kind of situation that one could avoid completely bwith BLW. (and I did purees with dd1 btw.)

dd2 was certainly coordinated enough at six months to eat everything, as long as you make sure it is the right size and consistency.
ime there is no more mess than splattered puree. (certainly the baby is mush less messy ime) and I haven't had any gagging/choking/crying or whatever.

I suppose I look at it from this perspective - why would you faff around with purees if you can just give them actual food? surely a more enjoyable experience for the baby and loads easier when you are out and about.