Baby Led Weaning

Growing healthy babies with healthy appetites

Archive for July, 2006

Asparagus

Monday, July 31st, 2006

The perfect baby led weaning food, I reckon. Not too messy, easy to prepare and it arrives pre-formed into the Rapley 'chip-shape'. Or the shape of a spear or asparagus, if you will.

The one mystery to asparagus is how you get rid of the woody bit at the bottom, but it's really very simple, you just hold it at both ends and gently bend until it snaps. Keep the top bit.

Uum, apart from that, steam the spears for about 6 minutes (obviously it depends on how thin they are). I over-cooked them to a sludgy green when I first gave them to Babybear but now she happily downs them al dente.

I have dipped them in hummus or cream cheese for her – am still a little frightened of putting her in charge of her own dip, since The Yoghurt Incident (see photo) – but I reckon she prefers them unadulterated. The only downside is that the season is so short. Yeah, you can get them flown in from Kenya all year round, but some of us very occasionally try to think about air miles an' that.

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Sweet Potato

Monday, July 31st, 2006

I have a bit of a love-hate relationship with this orange tuber. I love it and it hates me. (Wow, what a cliché, I really must try harder with this blog…)

My friend bakes them all the time and they are delicious. When I try they seem to drip molten lava onto the bottom of my oven which I will possibly clean the weekend before we move house. No plans to relocate at the moment, I'm just trying to give you an idea of my housekeeping schedule.

The sweet potato stalagmites that litter the floor of my oven have taught me a valuable lesson, though. You can never have too much kitchen foil. (By the way, was kitchen foil much more expensive in the 70s? My mother used to get palpitations if she over-estimated the size of a roasting tray by a wasteful half-inch…she HATES watching me pull screeds and screeds out to lavishly double layer a grill pan).

Having given up on making a baked sweet potato that doesn't explode in a hail of orangey shrapnel, I now tend to cut them into wedges and roast them on the foil-lined grill tray. Toss them in olive oil first, and I have found that smoked paprika makes a sensational spicy substitute for salt.

Roast them at 180-ish if it's a fan oven, 200-ish if not, for about 35 minutes. Again, you'll maybe have to rinse them to cool if you are in a hurry.

Babybear just loves them, though. Being orange they are pretty messy, as they don't make hard chips in the traditional sense but remain pretty squashy. Oooh, I've really tempted myself with this one. We are SO having smokey sweet potato wedges tomorrow. With a salad, natch…

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Potatoes

Monday, July 31st, 2006

So far, my darling daughter has chomped her way through the ever-versatile potato in many guises.

Roast potatoes. Yum. What can I say? Roast your potatoes whichever way you usually do (but no salt, boo, hiss) and then cut up and give to baby. Ta-dah! Actually, I am often forced to run potatoes for Babybear under the tap as they have frankly dangerous heat-retaining properties.

Jersey Royals. Oh, she loves these. Boil or steam (steam, I say) under tender (start checking with fork after ten minutes) then cut into quarters, leave to cool or run under cold water and hand to baby, noting any peach-like prefernce for skin-side up or down.

Chips. Yeah, yeah… What-EVVUR. Give them a chip every now and again for god's sakes. But blow on them first, in that marvelously inneffectual way that parents do. Obviously I wouldn't recommend making them a part of their daily diet (nor yours, now that I come to it) but if you find yourself in a restaurant or cafe and have checked that they haven't been salted then go on… live a little.

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Monday, July 31st, 2006

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Roast Chicken

Monday, July 31st, 2006

You'll no doubt have gathered by now that what I am attempting to do is systematically work my way through the list of Babybear's favourite delicacies that I mention on the front page… it's taking a while, eh?

Well, nobody's feeling it more than me, let me tell you… if I don't get it finished soon I'll have to regress her to a diet of sloppy baby rice for a fortnight while I catch up on her spectacular dietary habits.

Anyhow. Roast chicken.

First roast your chicken. I do it upside down (but enough about my love life, fnarr fnarr) so that the breasts are yummy and juicy, then whip off the tinfoil (again, enough about my love life) and turn it over for the last half hour so that the skin crisps. For extra flavour I tend to stick a lemon and some herbs, rosemary or thyme let's say, up its backside (insert your own sex joke here) especially now that the baby precludes smothering the skin in salt.

I found that the easiest and tastiest bit of the chicken to give to Babybear comes off the leg, but I suspect I'm going to find it hard to describe. You know, the kinda bingo wing bit, but it's on the leg… do I mean the thigh? Maybe. Anyway, the pieces part in almost a teardrop shape, which is perfect for baby led weaning, and the sinews of the meat run lengthways. I have found that if I give her the slightly drier breast meat she loses interest quicker and because more bits come off she is more likely to gag. Whatever works for you, kiddo. Oh and she's not above sucking on a bit of the skin. Nor is her mother.

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Weetabix

Sunday, July 30th, 2006

Boomer has been born into a family with a long held belief in the health giving properties of starting the day with a couple of weetabix. This conviction has been passed down through generations.  This is from her fathers side I think the flaky logs are particularly loathsome.

Anyway, so I gave Boomer a dry weetabix to play with and she scoffed almost a whole one, she sucked on it chewed and generally mushed it up until it was gone.

 

A word of warning dried weetabix bits are like some kind of cement – they give a pebble dashed appearance. Boomer is going to require an extra half hour in the tub tonight.

I don’t really know what the solution would be perhaps immediate soaking after weetabix but that’s a bit of a faff.

I think the best solution is to let her enjoy weetabix with her papa and then let papa deal with the mess.

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Pork Fillet

Wednesday, July 26th, 2006

Yes, pork fillet. If you don't believe me take a look at the Photos folder…
Anyway, we are at my mum's house and she is making dinner for her daughter (that's me – do keep up at the back). It's like Baby Led Weaning, but thirty years later.

So mum douses pork fillet in lemon and parsley butter, fries it on a ridged pan and puts it on my plate alongside some salad and some Jersey Royal potatoes. Yum Yum, thanks Mum.

Now, you might think that some lettuce, some potatoes and some cucumber might satifsy a younger person but no… once Miss Babybear had spotted her mother and grandmother tucking into their delicious meal then nothing else would do.

I first of all cut it into a kinda chip-shaped piece which was NOT a good idea as she was able to bite too many pieces off and was doing a bit of gagging.

Being my daughter, however, her will to eat the pork outweighed any sense of fear that she might have of an imminent choking incident so she continued to eat it and I was forced to take it off her.

Plan B, and this is the one in the photo, was to give her a lump the size of her fist (actually, this is in Gill Rapley's guidelines but I had forgotten) and Babybear was absolutely fine with it. She just chewed and chewed and sucked on it, turning around in her wee hands until she was left with a pretty tired and grey looking piece of meat which she dropped casually to the floor. This was, as you would expect, accompanied by a round of applause from the two preceding generations of women who surrounded her. Ma che brava!

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A Gagging Addendum

Wednesday, July 26th, 2006

A nice lady whose name escapes me has just written to me on another website to ask me if Babybear ever vomited after a gagging sesh. And of course she did, but because she hasn't done it in a while I had completely forgotten about it. How remiss of me…

So yes, she did do some puking after a big gag, but I just used to put my hand out to catch it and not make a fuss about it. A bit of 'oh, poor Babybear' and then back to her lunch.

What was peculiar about the vomit was that it seemed very mucus-y as opposed to sicky, almost as if her body had produced some sort of emergency lubricant to help clear her throat. I'd be really interested to know if anyone else had experienced this, so comment please if you can?

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The Gagging Thing v. The Choking Thing

Tuesday, July 25th, 2006

Okay, here goes.
I have no idea why I am largely impervious to the sight of my beloved daughter gagging… perhaps I am just cruel? Other people, such as her Grandma or her Auntie Sharron to name but two, cross the room at the speed of light the minute Babybear starts the tiniest gagging incident and it's all 'ohmygodshe'sCHOKING!' and slaps on the back.

And what does that achieve, ladies and gentlemen? One upset and confused baby, who was in the process of cleverly moving some food round to the front of her mouth with her tongue when some crazy adult swooped in and started battering her.

I do, however, understand why they react in this way – it's not nice when you see someone you love struggle to do something (and if Grandma and Auntie S take a similar approach when she is buying her first flat then all will be well).

What I can tell you is that prior to starting the baby led weaning business I attended an Infant Resuscitation Class at my local maternity hospital. I should have gone while I was pregnant, apparently, but I didn't, so there.

We got Grandma to baby sit while DH and I (and a couple of friends of ours, actually, which was pleasant cos we went for lunch afterwards) headed for the hospital. There was a heavily pregnant woman there who looked about as dazed as I would have been if I had gone at the correct time. She mostly stared at the plastic doll babies, then looked at her stomach, then back again, as if realising for the first time the enormity of what she had done. (Not to mention the enormity of the thing which would soon be emerging from her lady bits… anyway, I digress).

The class was excellent, can't recommend it too highly. I was lucky that my husband (you know the one, Babybear's father) was able to take the morning off so he could come with me because if it had fallen to me to explain how to resuscitate his child when I got home I would have wanted to smother him. Then resuscitate him, presumably.

Basically we all got to practise with the frighteningly realistic dolls, turning them upside down to pop obstructions out of their mouths and watching their little plasticky chests inflate. It really made me feel a great deal more confident about dealing with incidents, should they arise. Which I'm glad to say they haven't.

Gagging, as opposed to choking, is actually a safety response to food travelling too far back into the mouth so when we see our babies gagging they are actually handling the problem and it's best just to keep calm (or at least look calm) and wait until it passes. I give her a wee drink of water immediately afterwards which she seems to like.

I think that this is actually quite a good infant resuscitation website, but it is no substitute for a real class with a real (fake) baby.  http://www.bbc.co.uk/health/first_aid_action/hs_child.shtml

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Pasta in General

Tuesday, July 25th, 2006

26th July 2006
Funnily enough we haven't given her that much pasta yet, principally because I like it with a tomato-based sauce and she isn't supposed to be eating tomatoes yet. Also it does sometimes cross my mind that we are overloading her with gluten (what with the Organix Moon Biscuits and the constant rounds of toast) so if we're not eating pasta I'm certainly not making it specially.
I read somewhere that Farfalle and Fusilli are good for babies to hold onto, so that's what we have in the cupboard at the moment. She likes it with pesto, parmesan and asparagus, that sort of thing…

Update 4 March 2007

Nine months on from my first post and I am killing myself laughing about my po-faced 'we're not eating much pasta'… Babybear would now eat it morning, noon and night if I let her. We mostly stuck to Fusilli as the Farfalle were a bit gaggy to begin with (although she's fine with it now, obviously). I really want to recommend Conchiglie though, because the sauce gets stuck inside the shell so it becomes a dinky little parcel of veggie, carb and protein. We rarely have spaghetti as  both Babybear and her
father find it irritating, but the conchiglie are perfect for a spag blog.

Babybear eats A Lot of the three Ps, pesto, peas and pasta. It's our never-fail meal, to be honest. Sometimes I'll stir in some cream, creme fraiche or soft cheese if there is some in the fridge. Sometimes I'll whack in some fried bacon as well. Oh yes, we know how to live round our house, let me tell you…

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