...not that we are the experts... That honour belongs to a health visitor and researcher called Gill Rapley, who wrote a paper in 2003 which explored the age at which children can and should be weaned onto solid food.
The research found that six months was the optimum age, which is the time that mothers are now being told to wean by Health Visitors.
However, the distinct advantage of weaning at six months is that by that time our children are developmentally capable of feeding themselves - which means no more mush!
You just hand them the food in a suitably-sized piece and if they like it they eat it and if they don't they won't. (But they do, really they do... check out the six-month-old with the banana.)
That's the essence of Baby Led Weaning. No purees, no ice cube trays, no moulis, no food processor, no potato masher, no baby rice, no mixing everything with expressed breast milk or formula, no weird combinations of fruits and vegetables, no preparing everything weeks in advance... just you and your child, eating food that you enjoy with you and your family.
Anyway, as I said before, we are not experts in this area. What we are, however, is a pair of first-time mums feeling our way through the minefield that is encouraging our babies to have a healthy lifelong relationship with food. Our children (little darlings both) will be reporting from the front line over the next few months as we experiment with this Baby Led Weaning. (Although we'll be doing the bulk of the typing.)
My baby is nearly seven months old and already she has enjoyed fistfuls of broccoli, banana, green beans, red pepper, rice cakes and hummus, toast and cream cheese, mature cheddar, peaches, apricots, avocado, cucumber, pear, pasta with anchovies, chilli and lemon (her father...), pork fillet, roast chicken, roast potatoes, Jersey Royals, sweet potatoes, asparagus, melon and butternut squash. All of which she grabbed in her own little fist and ADORED feeding herself while her parents ate their own meals. I can't even begin to tell you how pleasant it is to eat in a restaurant with your Baby Led Weaning child chomping on a piece of bread and butter or a chunk of cucumber from your salad beside you.
Because it is a fairly new phenomenon we will hopefully be collating some information on Baby Led Weaning for you - personally I found it a nightmare trying to get hold of information on the subject, which is why I wanted to start this blog - but the truth is that the best way to start is to jump in. So join us, read how we are getting on and please, please comment on what we are doing. I'm probably going to be writing the bulk of the blog, principally because I suffer most from Runningoffatthemouth Disease. Morv is largely immune, but will be offering her salient and sensible opinions on the comments threads, as well as the odd (sometimes very odd) recipe.
If you have any questions we will do our best to answer them, but remember, we are just getting started here. If you have any better ideas or advice to pass on then please tell us.
Also, I know that I use a couple of websites and message groups already and you may have heard of the blog through them but I would really appreciate it if you could address any questions or comments only through this site as I really don't want anyone getting cross with me. I'm pretty sure you are required to register but I promise that we will take your privacy very seriously.
Good luck to anyone starting out with the Baby Led Weaning - so far it's been great fun for us and I hope it will be for you too.
Kindest regards, Aitch and Babybear, and Morv and Boomer.
PS I am probably about to have a big fat falling out with 'Blogware', who are the people that supply the software for this site, so if anyone has bookmarked this page with the address that contains the word blogware could they please change it to www.babyledweaning.com? If everyone uses that from now on then we will keep our Google ranking (which is actually astonishingly high) when inevitably part company with them. Thanks so much, and thanks for coming to see the site, it means an awful lot.
... and lololol I get in from hospital this afternoon and can't access the forum. Poor old Tech, the server has exploded. I'm ever so sorry, hope it doesn't cause a mass exodus to FB in protest at our meagre resources.
So if you'd like the update...
Basically am 33+5 today, they've given me the steroids to help the baby's lungs so we are technically good to go for the C section whenever it becomes apparent that inside me is Not A Good Place any more. Obviously that's in doubt at the moment anyway as the wee one hasn't grown in two weeks, but there will come a tipping point over the next few days where something else will start to fail and the decision will be made. It feels unbelievably weird, to be honest, to have someone say to you that your womb is a hostile environment for your child. Weird and rather hurtful, isn't that bizarre? I mean for god's sake, if there's one place your child is supposed to be safe...
Anyway, it's all a bit scary. My stupid blood pressure has responded fairly well to the extra drugs, the heart traces of the baby are fine etc, so with the growth it may just be (fingers crossed) that her body is concentrating its efforts on growing organs and brain rather than piddling around with body fat. God, I hope so.
I went to see Special Care, it looked nice enough, y'know... there's a huge part of me that just wants this not to be happening, in fact I'd say that's mostly it for the moment... but it is happening so there we have it. I have to keep my BP down somehow (as you can imagine the builders upstairs are really helping with that) and just hope for the best that we can stay things for another wee while, if that's the best thing. I'm going back to hospital tomorrow for more checks, in best Big Brother style I've to pack my case in advance in case I'm evicted to the operating theatre. If not, I'll give you the update tomorrow.
Feels weird writing this personal stuff on the blog rather than the forum, I hope you get to see it. Thank you so much for the support that I Just Know I'm getting from you all, even if I can't see it right now. Thanks so much for the emails and the texts, and the messages on MN. I'm rather surprised at how much it means, actually. It means the world. Who knew?
Mwah. Am off to eat spaghetti alle vongole - play fast and loose with the seafood advice in pregnancy? Why not? It's not like I'm going to be in this condition much longer, is it?
Albeit for the moment in a rather unedifying Plain Jane format (apparently that too will be fixed when something technical re-indexes and we will all be turned into bee-yootiful butterflies...
Do us a favour, will you, and put the new address into your favourites? Everything's going to be in the one place from now on, better for Google rankings etc. Cheers m'dears.
It's just someone said recently that they'd been reading the blog for months before noticing that we had a forum. I admit it's not the jazziest of buttons, but it's there on the left, look... Click now to talk etc
See you on there! (We do talk about other things, you'll be relieved to hear).
I know, I haven't posted in yonks cos of the other site etc etc... but look, this is an allergy-friendly bready-type recipe so I thought I'd make the exception.
"Aiden and I often share this one for lunch with various
toppings. It needs to be made fresh on the day though, doesn't keep too
well.
Ingredients
1/4 cup
plain flour (works great with gluten free flour) 1/4 cup polenta 1/4 cup
milk (works great with rice milk) 1 egg 1 teaspoon of baking powder
4 teaspoons of vegetable oil
Method
Mix the
ingredients together to form a thick batter except for one teaspoon of oil. Heat
a thick bottomed pan and add the remaining oil to grease, pour in the batter and
cook over a moderate heat turning once the surface has dried out and looks
bubbly."
it's because it's all happenin' on the forum right now, pretty much, while we sort out this new, better, less bloggy site.
Do me a favour and click on it from this site, though, rather than bookmarking the forum, because that way we won't plummet out of our No1 Google ranking. Much appreciated, as is all your support.
I'd be so grateful if you could have a look here and tell me what you want from a proper site when I am finally released from the bondage of this godawful blogware. I am not, as you may already have noticed, very technically adept so I'd appreciate absolutely as much help as I can possibly get. What do you want the chapters to be? What's actually important when you're starting off? Or even before? Thing is, because this was just a wee blog when it started, I've just grown it organically but now we need to do some, er, pruning...
Weird, eh? I'm not sure, to be honest, that any baby would be eating enough rice at the beginning to do them much damage but hey, I'm not a biochemist.
I've always said it was my favourite kiddie mag. Actually, it's the one I first found out about BLW in so I really mean that.
Anyway, I'm really chuffed, there we are under the headline 'Get Weaning Right'... really pleased. Who'd have thought when I started a silly wee blog over a year ago that we'd be getting magazine coverage?
If you look to the right in the Comments section Sandra has typed some of it up, I'll do the rest shortly but right now I simply must do some work. There is also some discussion of it on the forum as well.
Ladies, we are part of a movement now. How unbelievably cool is that? We're a Thing...
It's here, and it's officially The Worst-Kept Secret In Town...
We put it up a couple of days ago and some of you have been testing it out for us. There are still things needing to be ironed-out, lord knows, but I thought I'd tell you about it anyway.
Thing is, as you've probably noticed we keep going over our band-width every month, which results in the site being innaccessible for anything up to a week. I've begged and pleaded so we weren't shut off this time, but we are under Strict Instruction to sort it out by the end of September. Consider us told, Mr Internet Man.
If we move the chat to a forum, temporarily based on some other webspace I have, then we will save on bandwidth here. I'd really appreciate it if you could still post comments on here, though. Particularly the Polls and FAQ bit, because I really think that's building up towards being a fantastic resource of all our many and various experiences.
But for anything that might go onto Random Thoughts, or to celebrate breakthroughs or have right old moan about mothers-in-law and their unceasing ability to spoon-feed behind our backs, come to the forum. Please. [needy icon]
I've been meaning to post these for ages, I found them a while ago and must've forgotten to put them up. Sometimes I forget how big a deal the whole choking thing seems when you're starting off because it's all such a long time ago for us. Make sure you read the FAQs if you are
concerned, because there's a really interesting post where everyone
says how often their babies choked and the answer, you will be
delighted to hear, is 'hardly ever, if at all'.
So look, here are some links from the NHS Breastfeeding People and NHS Healthy Start that say finger food is fine from 6 months. (Look at pages 4 and 5 in the first document for information specific to self-feeding, and lord knows pay particular attention to the monumentally stupid face that the woman on the cover photo is pulling as she tries to encourage Junior to eat. That poor child is mortified, so you've been saved from that if nothing else.)
Anyway, both of those documents , in conjuction with the WHO's guideline that solids should be a complement to milk up to a year are good news for BLWers, I think. And bad news for those well-known pushers of baby rice... our much-loved mothers-in-law.
Please, please, please would you bookmark this site simply as www.babyledweaning.com rather than the blogware address that comes up on Google. I'm reaching the end of my tether with them so will have to move on soon. However, I think that will pretty much obliterate my Google ranking so the more of you who start using the www.babyledweaning.com address the better. Many thanks, Aitch x
Anyway, I've already posted the Observer link on the right hand side but there are now stories on the BBC website and the Daily Mail as well. They all seem to be running with the same quotes and the story that feeding babies puree is 'unnatural', which, to be honest, doesn't sound very much like Gill Rapley talking but hey ho. I mean, feeding babies processed jars of food is unnatural in the sense that all processed food is, but it seems a bit of a harsh word to use under the circumstances.
So what do we think? It's exciting, I think, that Baby Led Weaning is getting more exposure but I'm not entirely thrilled that it's being couched in such judgemental terminology.
Post Script 23rd June. Well when the Kazakhstan Official News Service is reporting it, it's safe to say you've got a big story on your hands. Oh, and I have good reason to believe that Gill Rapley was, as we suspected, wildly mis-quoted in the Observer article. [taps nose] [saying nothing]
Far be it from me to chastise anyone in my profession... but if you were thinking of doing a non-hysterical story about Baby-Led Weaning then email me and I will do what I can to help. I'm sure some of the parents of the babies in the photos would be only too happy to oblige with a quote or two. Press on my name above (Aitch) and you'll get the address. Oh how we all love the silly season...
I mean I know I should care, really, but I can't make myself. I've given away our breadmaker and everything. (To be fair, I wouldn't have done if I had more counter space but it was just So Big).
To give you a historic spin on the matter, my great-grandma had to be physically restrained from sprinkling salt on my food when I was a baby as according to her just a few grains would stimulate the taste buds. Now, presumably that means my mother and grandmother had endured the same treatment and yet their kidneys haven't failed.
I appreciate, however, that a sample of two isn't scientifically compelling. Not only that, food has changed a lot since those days and processing adds layers of salt that we don't even taste any more. But I'd still have to say that it's not something I'm enormously troubled by. I don't add salt to things like pasta or veg, and we never add any at the dinner table, so I don't really pay much attention to salt in ham, cheese and bread since Babybear's turned one. Plus we've always preferred unsalted butter.
We do add a bit of veal stock to casseroles and maybe some reduced salt Marigold to soups (although is it only me or does it make things taste awfully same-y?) so I think that makes us fairly virtuous on the salt front. Plus, Babybear drinks water well, so I'm not worried about dehydration.
Am I kidding myself, however? Should I be more stressed about it? What do you lot do? Answers on a postcard please...
Aaaaah, Quorn. That's on my list of 'things we should eat more of.' Or is that tofu? I get so confused...
"Hi there
Aitch,
I thought it was about time we had a
Quorn recipe on the blog so here is a recipe for veggie meatballs. It isn’t
really mine, I have amended it from Jenny Maizels book but the Pumpkin loves
these served with a tomato sauce and pasta so I thought I would share it. Be
warned though, it can be quite messy.
Veggie Meatballs (but you could use
mince and have normal meatballs). Makes about 16
1 small red onion
chopped
1clove garlic,
chopped
200g veggie mince (I use
Quorn)
1tsp dried mixed
herbs
1tsp of smoked
paprika
2-3 tbsp of passata/tinned toms (I
usally use passata but I don’t think it matters
much)
11/2 slices of bread made into
breadcrumbs
1 beaten
egg
Heat some olive oil and fry onion
and garlic until soft
Add mince with herbs and tomatoes,
cook for about 5 mins (until it is cooked through if you are using meat rather
than veggie stuff)
Stir in breadcrumbs, leave to cool
and then stir in the egg.
Shape into walnut size balls (you
can freeze any you don’t want immediately at this
point)
Place on a greased baking sheet for
about 20 mins (200/400/gas mark 6)"
Potato and Parsnip
Rosti Ingredients
1 parsnip, peeled, cored and grated
1
potato, peeled and grated
50g/2oz unsalted butter (i dindn't bother weighing,
I just used what I needed - alternatively you could just use olive oil)
1
tbsp olive oil
Method
1. Place the grated potato and parsnip
onto a clean tea towel and squeeze over a bowl to remove the excess
liquid.
2. Melt the butter with the oil in a frying pan over a medium heat,
add the grated potato and parsnip, press down and season with salt and freshly
ground black pepper.
3. Fry the rösti for 2-3 minutes on each side, using a
fish slice to carefully turn it over, until crisp and golden-brown.
The
recipe did not suggest this, but after cooking those fantastic cougette fritters
today, I think the next time I would add some flour and a bit of baking powder
too - as it seemed to bind everything so much better.
Er, my baby did sleep through the night, right up until the moment that she started eating solids. Thank God it didn't take too long for her to re-settle.
'You have to start with mild flavours'
Gawd, no. You should see Babybear's face when confronted with mild cheddar. She just point blank refuses, absolutely disgusted that something which looks like delicious mature cheddar would taste like whipped milky fat.
Any others? Apart from, of course, the obvious...
'You've got to start with purees, so they can get used to the idea of eating.'
There seem to be a lot of people starting off about now (welcome, ladies...) so I thought that if we could all rack our soggy memories for what we recall about the early days that might be a fun idea.
I'll start...
Urm.
She farted. Like, for the first time since she was very wee the farts seemed to go on for ever.
And the poos. They started to smell rather rank. But for Babybear, they still kept that newborn consistency for months and months. Plus the food did not dissolve for ages either. It was like watching the Generation Game conveyor belt in our house, with me and DH shouting 'oooh, carrot, carrot', 'grape skin', 'apricot skin' 'resuscitated sultana' etc etc. The fruit skins often go black, by the way, which is most unnerving. And then of course the 'oh jesuschrist, come quick, the baby's got worms' when she did her first banana poo.
Sorry to disappoint on this as well, but contrary to what every Health Visitor in the coutnry seems to think, her sleeping did Not Improve when she was weaned. It Got Worse. Having said that, she'd been sleeping all night since she was about 8 weeks old so we couldn't exactly have got better. It took a few weeks to readjust and then got fine again. Until she got to 10 months and her naps went a bit weird but that was because I was giving her food too close to bedtime I think, and her tummy was getting full of veg rather than yummy calorific, soporific milk.
You should have a look at them. The chap from the Dutch website (turns out he's a dietitian) has asked me to publish his Weaning Schedule and of course I've agreed. Plus there are some very cute clips of babies eating on youtube which might be worth showing to doubters.
Many people on Mumsnet are walking a sponsored mile with their babies in memory of a little two-year-old girl called Maude who went for her afternoon nap and died a victim of SIDS. Her mum is a prolific poster on Mumsnet and she is fully backing the campaign, which will raise money for Cot Death charities. The website is here, and anyone who wishes to join in or to make a donation would be doing A Good Thing.
Have just realised that about twenty listings for finger food have disappeared as we've obviously run out of space in the folder... will try to sort it later and will check if other folders have also been affected. Would have been nice if an alert had come up to warn me, huh? Sorry about this...
Sorry about this, I'm operating between about four laptops at the moment and I've just realised I've deleted all my BLW emails between the end of November and now. Yes, that's right Vanilla, even the ones from tonight. I am only slightly an idiot... it's really mostly Dell's fault. Don't buy a laptop from them, please.
So could everyone who sent photos and recipes please, please re-send them? Sorry for the inconvenience, truly.
Apologies first, I have not intended to be the silent partner in the whole blog thing but my internet connection has been dead since before Christmas and I have just literally had time to fix it – i.e. spent a couple for hours on the phone to India, interestingly enough one of their quick fix questions was to ask if had a Christmas tree lights on! Embarrassingly enough my last bill had bounced and the lack of internet connection may have not been unrelated.
Boomer being the junior member of the blwing team turned one a couple of weeks after Babybear. This coincided with stopping breastfeeding and moving on to cows milk, which she utterly loves.
I has always thought that I would feed her myself for the 1st year and then switch over to cows milk gradually in the whole spirit if baby led weaning. Things happened a little more abruptly than I thought but I do think moving onto drinking and eating from breastfeeding are quite intertwined in our case – I will try and explain.
Just before Christmas I started to get rubbed raw bits on my nipples which were not healing and getting slightly infected. (Nice yes I know) Breastfeeding was pretty painful but we persisted as I thought things would decrease naturally (which the feeds were) so I would just persist until the nipples healed and we wound down the breastfeeding. This was the situation for a about two weeks but things just got steadily worse and when Boomer bit me four times on hogmanay I actually thought I was going to have to get my nipple sewed back on. On new years day I woke and decided that I would delay giving Boomer a feed until later to hep the healing, but later came and I couldn’t face it , and Boomer had been drinking cows milk all day and frankly didn’t seem that bothered.
So basically from then we’ve just stopped, she had been having cows milk for a while so to switch straight over I don’t think was really that hard on her. She doesn’t appear to want breastfed particularly and a snuggle and a drink seems to be an ok replacement.
This is why I think this was a natural conclusion, I think that my nipples were getting really damaged because Boomer had changed the way she breastfed because she was eating more. Whether her jaw muscles have changed or she has simply started to ‘forget’ how to suckle I don’t know. It wasn’t that she had more teeth she has had the same amount for the last few months. I really don’t think it was coincidence that these problems appeared around the time of her first birthday and that magically weaning point. I would be interesting the know if anybody else has noticed a similar change in feeding.
The main side effect of the sudden stop and not slow wind down is that my breasts have reached an engorged level only generally achieved through surgery and boy are they sore. It’s nearly a week and still the slightest knock is really painful. So If repeating the experience I would defiantly try and go for a controlled stop not an emergency one.
Or something like that. I could go and look at the pack but it's too far away... Basically they are smaller than normal Shredded Wheat, so they're easy for the babies to hold onto. Obviously they're wheat, but salt-wise there's just a trace measurement so that's fine. I just microwave them for five seconds in a splash of cows' milk (because We Are One, y'know), so they absorb the milk and soften a little. Babybear eats about fifteen of these in a sitting, she loves them with a banana. Good news, as Babybear was becoming - dare I say it? - a little bored with porridge pancakes. More to the point, they are pretty clean breakfast so essential for those morning when a quick getaway is required.
Post Script Littleducks from Mumsnet has pointed out that it was she who told me about Mini Shreddies, and has therefore demanded due credit. (Diva.)
Just discovered that pomegranate segments ( the small wee bits inside - segments, seeds dunno? ) make a great finger food. I think that pomegranates are just the best thing ever so I’m really glad that Boomer has also taken a liking to them. The only thing is that they are possibly the most expensive fruit but worth it. Pomegranates are one of these things that you see listed as super foods , and I do think they are just super too. Apparenty they are a natural contraceptive too, don’t know what quantities you have to eat though – or maybe you don’t eat it ….must stop there.
It doesn’t mention pomegranates specifically in the allergy food guides so not sure if its one of these dangerous fruits or not – anybody got a clue?
I do it quite often, actually. Since becoming a parent myself I've found that my tolerance for cooing over other people's babies has risen considerably. (And it's a good way of keeping Babybear occupied - she finds babies fascinating and appears entirely unaware that she is one herself.)
Anyway, one thought just struck me but I'm unsure how to express it without causing offence. Here goes.
None of them exactly look like they're starving, do they?
I mean, it's the biggest worry about doing this BLW thing, isn't it? That they aren't going to get enough, that somehow we are depriving them if we don't spoon the food into their mouths. And yet one look at the photos on this blog confirm that simply isn't the case. It has made me giggle a bit, actually.
For the record, anyone who wants to put a photo up is welcome to send them to my email (press my name and you'll find it) and I'll stick them on for you with pleasure. More strange creatures for Babybear to stare at...
(Weird, I've also just noticed that some of our photos of the early months have dropped off... wonder if the folder has become too big? Will investigate further.)
