Now she gets to have an opinion… dammit
So in the beginning it was all 'Wow, what's this green stuff? Broccoli? Really? Wonder what it tastes like?' etcetera etcetera. But now she's tasted a few things Babybear is beginning to let me know her likes and dislikes.
She's a bit off the broccoli, to be honest, but can't get enough apples. (It's very cute, we've put the fruit bowl on a low table and she goes and grabs an apple or a banana when she fancies one. Not that she can get them started without some help, I mean she is fairly gifted, obviously, but she's not that good…)
She has decided that she is over green beans but she still loves peas, frozen or cooked. Cauliflower she can take or leave. But then so can I. She seems to like all of her carbs, so she's delighted to eat pasta, bread and porridge, and happily chomps down on lentils, beans and meat. Steak is okay, pork is better but chicken, by god… she adores roast chicken, basically eating the meat off two legs of chicken the other night. I didn't hand her the whole leg, by the way, I am aware that she's not Henry VIII.
However carrot, my friends, is off the menu. Won't even touch it, bless her headstrong little socks.
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Oh my GOD we have a Search button option and I'd never noticed…
Sorry about that.
It's not perfect, actually, as it only searches through the pieces that Morv and I have written, but it does at least get you started. And it brings up photos, which as we all know are the only bits of this site that people are really interested in…
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Toothbrushing
So is everyone doing this, then? Morning and night?
HOW?
We probably manage to brush Babybear's teeth once a day, in her bath, but to be honest she very rarely lets me put the brush into her mouth so it's very much up to her how co-operative she wishes to be. Often she spends more time chewing the end of the brush than she does cleaning her teeth. We aren't using baby toothpaste because my friend told me that we shouldn't (although I've quite forgotten the reason, of course… possibly something to do with fluoride?) so I just rub the tiniest amount into the brush before handing it over. For some reason the mintiness takes her completely by surprise every time, but I try not to laugh too hard as I feel this could create the wrong mood.
This is far from a top tip, because I have actually come in search of top tips… but I do notice that if I am brushing my teeth at the same time things tend to go better. In fact, the very best way to get her to do it is to allow her to steal my (very soft) toothbrush, but as I see her trusting little face turned up I do sometimes worry that I will be passing on germs that her immune system will collapse under. Still, whatever works…
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Babycentre has published a piece on BLW… hmmmmm
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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Sweetcorn
Ah, autumn, season of mists and mellow fruitfulness, as some dead poet once said. (Think it was Keats, but to be honest I probably only remember the poem because the next line contains the word 'bosom').
As Lorna has already pointed out in the increasingly enormous Main Page comments section, there are pumpkins to be eaten but it's best to keep them small-to-medium or they lose flavour. However, our great triumph thus far has been corn-on-the-cob, simply microwaved for three to five minutes in a covered glass dish with a splash of water.
They are hot when they come out, and much as you try to run them under the tap to cool them the cob stays boiling so you have to set them aside for a while until you're sure it's safe.
Then chop the cob into 1-2 inch pieces, take a bite yourself to get things started and voila, one happy, occupied child. Some children can eat the whole thing (please see above photo and the impressive Little Wriggler) but I just chop them up to save wasting a whole cob at a time. Babybear tends to get bored about halfway through so I just cut the rest of the corn off for her and let her exercise her pincer grip for maximum time wasteage.
And I know that I said I would look into baby sweetcorn ages ago… I have tried to buy them but while there are so many local veggies around it seems too naughty to clock up that many air miles. (My corn-on-the-cob came from Spain, which is hardly round the corner but still…) I have no doubt, however, that faced with a farmers' market filled with turnips I will cave in this winter and try the baby corn, wherever it has flown in from.
