http://www.babycentre.co.uk/baby/startingsolids/babyledweaning/
It's fine, y'know, basically just a crib from the crazy Dutch website piece that Gill Rapley co-wrote and of course it's good to have more information out there… but they do stuff it up at one point when they get their resident Health Visitor to comment on BLW. Why oh why do they let these people interfere..?
Here's the paragraph, entitled:
“Are there any disadvantages to Baby Led Weaning?
“Not all foods can easily be made
into baby-friendly finger shapes so your baby's diet may be rather
limited, unless you are very inventive. Helen Pegg, BabyCentre's health
visitor advises parents to include at least some mashed foods when they
starting the weaning process. This allows you to give your baby a more
varied diet.”
Mashed foods – what? Mashed potato? Cos that's quite easily turned into a chip-shape, I find… oh, you want more varied than broccoli and asparagus and mangetout do you? Well, let me have a think about that. I am pretty inventive, you know…
Well, one thing that it might be useful to know is that the babies only need the chip-shaped thing for about a fortnight after which in my humble experience their motor control develops at an alarming rate and they stick their little hands round anything they can possibly get hold of.
That's big flakes of fish, that's steak, that's pasta shapes, that's bread with home-made chicken soup spooned over it, that's apricot, pear and peach bum-cheeks, pieces of chicken, green beans, baby corn, that's meatballs, moon biscuits, rice cakes, cucumber, apples, as well as the nutritionally essential car keys and television remote controls. Oh for goodness sakes, I know a lot of those things actually come in a chip-shape (green beans and baby corn, I'm thinking) but I am truly at a loss as to which foodstuffs this woman was talking about. Trust a bloody Health Visitor to come in at the end and bollocks things up…
Okay, I'm really not kidding, I want a list of foods that cannot be cut or moulded in such a way that a child of, say 7 months, wouldn't be able to eat. For the first month let's assume that you are mostly doing carrots, broccoli, banana, potato, cucumber, cheese, pasta, that sort of thing. Not that I was, but then as I said I am very inventive…
Here's mine.
1. Couscous. Unless I slightly overcook it so that it goes a wee bit clumpy in which case it's fine. Babybear loves it with roast veggies, by the way… must write that up one day.
2. Rice Pudding. Only because we haven't had it yet, really, cos it's been summer. Obviously it's a staple of most jar-fed babies diets regardless of the season (I got a jar of Cow & Gate Organic rice pud free from Ikea which has a best before of July 2007… Jesus wept…) so poor Babybear has lived a life without cream and sugar and rice so far. I might make some now that the weather is turning, I bet she'd wolf it down now but at 7 months it might have been tricky.
3. Lentils. Well, you could get inventive on their ass and make them into some kind of burger I suppose but I am prepared to give Helen Pegg HV lentils. Until 8 months-ish, in Babybear's case, when she was able to grab them just fine.
Any more for any more? I'm not taking the piss, I really want to make up a list and send it to Babycentre so that future BLWers can see the foods which this method so cruelly excludes from our babies not-very-varied-diet, at least for a while.
Post-Script
Okay, so I have posted our puny list of 8 things that babies can't have on the Babycentre website, along with a polite explanation of the demerits of their Health Visitor's astronomical gaffe. Much to my embarrassment, however, it turns out that Babycentre don't let you put paragraph marks onto their pages (they do before you press 'submit', the eejits) so now my reasoned argument against mashing food for BLWers look like the spittle-flecked rantings of a lone crazy woman…
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