Total novice just after blw advice from those who have been there

[tenacityflux]

Hi,

My DD is 18 weeks and BF except for one bottle which is a hang over from early (reluctant) mixed feeding due to weight loss in week 2. I don't want to push weaning and am interested in BLW but would just like to know when/how to start. At the moment when I'm eating next to her, I'll let her see/hold some of it, like a piece of banana just for fun but that's it; I don't really want to do the commercial baby food stuff and the dreaded baby rice, would rather cook fir her myself - so all advice really welcome! (Oh....and do they really sleep better when they eat solids??)

no they don't sleep better, sorry. i'd go to forum.babyledweaning.com where there are tonnes of extremely friendly mums at various stages of blw. there's loads of info on there

When she's 6 months, plonk some of your food on her high chair tray and let her decide what and when to eat.

If you start changing your cooking over to no added salt now, it'll be easy to share your food

It's so easy, you don't have to do jars of baby food or baby rice or even pureeing your own food as some 'experts' will tell you. Just make sure that at least some of the food on your plate is stuff you'd be happy with her eating - no added salt like cmotdibbler says. Then when she gets interested she can grab it off your plate. Make the pieces big enough so that she can hold it and still get a bit in her mouth - you don't have to chop it up or anything.

I personally held on until 6 months, so you've still got a while to go. The advice is based on research that shows the gut isn't really ready for solid food until then. I started at 4 months with ds1 and wish I hadn't. Ds2 and ds3 have both started at or after 6 months and it's worked well for us.

The babyledweaning.com site looks great, perhaps also have a look at kellymom.com on starting solids as I found their explanation of 'complementary foods' very helpful when my ds2 was getting about 90-95% of his nutrition from my breastmilk at 1yo. As long as you are offering food and they are getting a large range of tastes it doesn't really matter how much is really getting into their stomach.

Cool, nothing to worry about for the next 2 months then, I can try and cut down the salt before then and will check out the sites mentioned - ahh well, never mind about the sleep, just a hope!