The Blog - Baby Led Weaning

Spinach

Not the most obvious of finger foods but luckily the Husband is an adventurous type (especially when faced with an empty fridge) and so he steamed Babybear some spinach for a couple of minutes then wrung it out a bit and plonked it in a pile on her highchair tray.

Surprisingly, she found it incredibly easy to eat. Her technique largely relies upon jamming as much of the green stuff as possible into her mouth and then pulling out what cannot be immediately downed in one bite before pushing the rest back in. It's grimly fascinating, not to mention hugely convenient as there are few vegetables her parents enjoy more than spinach done with a wee bit of garlic, lemon juice and olive oil…

Posted on August 17th, 2006 in Getting Started - Finger Food Basics/Finger Food Basics - Month 2 with 8 Comments

Nectarines

Boomer loooves nectarines and so do I so its grand. I started by giving slices of necatarines to Boomer (roughly a eighth but sometimes a quarter if the fruit was quite small) . At first I would hold the piece and she would suck of the flesh this was when she was about 5 ½ months. By about 6 mths I could leave pieces on her high chair and dance away to do other exciting mummy tasks while obviously never leaving my child unattended.

Now Boomer is 7 and a wee bitty mths and she can hold a eat a nectarine by herself. I often take a wee bite out of it to get her started not because I want it myself of course.

She is also teething at the moment and I think she actually quite enjoys chomping the stone was she has demolished the nectarine. I do take the stone away fairly quickly though as its kinda chokey chokey gullet sized.

Posted on August 15th, 2006 in Getting Started - Finger Food Basics/Finger Food Basics - Month 2 with No Comments

"Oh, we are doing Baby Led Weaning but I do use a spoon to get stuff down him if I don't think he's eaten enough'"

Great, you do that. Knock yourself out. But it's not baby led weaning you're doing, my friend, that's spoon feeding with some finger food.

Now, I'm not here to offend anyone, but it does need saying. I'm not against spoons, in fact I'm rather fond of them (particularly dessert spoons) and am keen that Babybear learns to use one at some point. Right now she's eight months old and if she wants to feed herself off a spoon then fabulous, or if I load up a spoon and she leans forward to take the food that's equally marvy.

Shoveling it in, however, is really not on in my opinion because the title Baby Led Weaning, while admittedly a touch cringeworthy, is not formed from three words plucked at random. If you want your child to 'lead' their own weaning then you have to trust that they know what they are doing. It does require something of a mental gear change, I understand, from the whole 'three-meals-a-day' thing that we are all used to, but it is a shift worth making.

So all of this means that if the babies seem to be saying that they aren't particularly hungry for solids at that particular moment, feel free to back off. Sometimes Babybear really surprises me by not fancying her favourite food, but if that's the case then I have to acknowledge that it's her stomach and her appetite and she knows best. On those days, she will generally take more milk to compensate, which is fair enough as she must know that the milk is higher in calories than even the tastiest broccoli tree. Perhaps it's her way of handling a wee growth spurt, who knows? It's not up to me, she's the baby and she is leading this weaning malarkey.

P.S. That, by the way, is as hippyish and child-centred as I ever intend to get. i started this whole baby led weaning thing because I am too lazy to puree, for goodness sakes…

Posted on August 14th, 2006 in Random Thoughts - post your questions here with 18 Comments

Sushi

How utterly bourgeois can you get? Sushi, by god… in my day we thought Findus Crispy Pancakes were exotic.

But really, she thought it was delicious. It was just M&S's little pepper round ones, while I scarfed down the fishy offerings, but she definitely enjoyed squashing the rice out of the seaweed and eating it. She had a good bash at the seaweed as well, to be fair, but in the end it defeated her and she pulled it back out of her mouth in an inky green ribbon. And millions of Japanese children can't be wrong…

Posted on August 14th, 2006 in Getting Started - Finger Food Basics/Finger Food Basics - Month 2 with 2 Comments

Baby Led Weaning Chicken Soup

So, what did you do with the bones and carcass of your lemony roast chicken from the Finger Foods section? Boiled them up for half an hour with an onion, a stick of celery, a carrot, a couple of bay leaves, some peppercorns and a clove of garlic, did you? Mah-velous, then we are ready to make baby led weaning chicken soup.

Okay then, it's basically just normal chicken soup, so do whatever you usually do (in my case sweat an onion and some leeks if I have them, sling in a couple of sliced carrots and some sliced sticks of celery, add the stock and possibly some low-salt Marigold bouillon to taste and if I feel like it throw in some rice or pasta near the end).

But the smarty-pants thing to remember is to cut some of your veggies in the chip-sized manner (or finger-sized, if we wish to be understood by our New World cousins) and to drop them into the soup while it is cooking.

After a while you are left with the most delicious soft carrot and celery (and whatever else you fancy) which has been poached in chicken soup and can be taken directly from the parental bowl and handed (after a bit of blowing and cooling down) to the baby. Which they love, let's face it. I also find that Babybear likes to eat crusty bread dipped in soup and wrung out like a wee sponge so it isn't too soggy.

Post Script.
We've been putting a good handful of barley into our chicken soup recently and Babybear loves it. She can feed herself a few grains of barley at a time on a spoon (I load it up) and also if you put some crusty bread into the bowl to soak up the soup then press down hard you will simultaneously squeeze the liquid out and pick up lots of barley and veggies. She eats these like an open sandwich, her face wreathed in smiles and carrots.

Posted on August 14th, 2006 in Recipes with No Comments

Routine…Shmoutine…

Who needs an alarm clock? Not me, baby…

I'd have to say that Babybear is an excellent sleeper (although she is currently playing with her baby gym beside me and it's nearly 1am sowhat'sallthatabout?) but her parents are a couple of disorganised layabouts who like to stay up late and get up later. So we obviously knew from the minute I peed on the stick that we weren't going to be following any strict childcare regime. (Well, that and the fact that the likes of Gina Ford's routine is SO badly written that it makes your skin itch. Say what you like about letting babies cry it out – and I'd prefer you say that it's unnecessarily cruel – but, my GOD that woman's writing gave me the heebie-jeebies.)

So when she was first born, we consciously decided not to stress about Babybear's sleeping habits, so once we got throught the first six weeks of constant night-time breastfeeding, we all used to go to bed as a family at about 12midnight and watched DVDs while I breastfed and the bub dropped off at about 1am. She would then generally sleep 'til 9 or 10am, the good little sausage. (Actually, these were pretty much the hours I kept while pregnant, which I don't think can be a coincidence).

It was the baby herself who dialled that back to 11pm, then 9pm then 7.30pm and more recently since weaning her we've noticed that she needs to go to bed at 6.30pm if we want to avoid that hellish 'over-tired' thing. (That bloody Vauxhall advert has so re-programmed the Husband's puny brain that he cannot pronounce it any other way than 'ooooveh-tiad' so for that reason alone I find it's best to get the baby down before she gets to that stage. )

I'm not sure if it got worse because of weaning, teething, or learning to crawl so that she is now more fatigued, but we did have a bad spell quite recently where she was just roaring with pain and exhaustion for a couple of hours at night – bearing in mind we have been so spoilt we thought our world was coming to an end – and it took us a while and a few frantic 'help me oh dear god help me' posts on Mumsnet before we got to the bottom of it and decided that we were feeding her solids too close to her last milk feed. See, you knew this would come back to baby led weaning eventually, you just had to stick with me…

So for interest I can tell you that I tend to treat her milk feeds and solids as something quite different to her solids, and insofar as we have a schedule it goes a little seomthing like this:

She normally wakes up at 7.52am – you think I'm kidding? – has a bottle at about 8-ish, then solids
(cheese, porridge pancakes, peaches) at 9-ish then a bath or a wipe-up and another
bottle before another nap from about 10 or 11 till 12-ish or 1-ish…

Then some snacks (rice cakes, a banana, Organix moon biscuits and her water) as we
are out and about and probably another bottle after an afternoon nap in
the buggy, then if we are at home she has some solids (fruit, pasta,
whatever is around) at 4 ish and then her last bottle at 6-ish.

It's all very -ish, isn't it? But basically all I am saying is that if I want her to drink her bottles
properly I know I have to leave a good couple of hours without snacks. And even at that her daytime bottles are often left half-empty… which I have just had to chill right out about because as you know, baby led weaning is all about responding to the child's cues, not your poxy paranoia that they are about to starve to death…

Posted on August 14th, 2006 in Random Thoughts - post your questions here with 4 Comments

What size is a chip?

Well, chip-sized obviously… I mean, durrrr.

Although… it has been pointed out to me that a chip in the US is what we in sunny Glasgow call a crisp. Why? Because it is crisp, my friends. We are but simple souls.

In the States and Australia and no doubt other wrong-thinking young upstart countries, they made a wee mistake and called them chips, despite the fact that they are more slice-like in character. (Listen, don't get me started, in Australia they call chips 'hot chips', they call sweeties 'lollies' and if you order a 'scallop' in a fish and chip shop there you are in for a horrible surprise.)

So from now on I am happy to refer to the classic Rapley chip-sized baby portion as 'a finger' (as in 'a finger of fudge is just enough' – what do you mean you don't know what I'm talking about? It's an advertising classic, surely?)

That's an adult finger. However, a fist-sized portion will continue to refer to the infant fist, rather than the mitts of a hairy-arsed adult.

Has this helped? I fear not…

Posted on August 7th, 2006 in Random Thoughts - post your questions here with 2 Comments

Plums

She HATED them! I was thrilled. Flat-out refused to put the revolting, slippy, sour, ultra-tannic substance in her mouth. The Husband, who has been known to enjoy a Victoria plum in his time, proposed that I might be projecting my dislike for this most pointless of fruit onto the baby but I couldn't hear him properly because I was clapping and whooping too much.

He later gave me a telling-off for encouraging my daughter to inherit my prejudices. But that's what children are for, is it not?

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Posted on August 6th, 2006 in Getting Started - Finger Food Basics/Finger Food Basics - Month 2 with No Comments

Mountains of Mess

Having had it pointed out that the spare bit of lino in our bathroom would make the ideal mat for under Boomers highchair (thanks Aitch!). Ive been using this square of lino for a couple of weeks now.

Its great , the bits that Boomer has finished with pretty much land on the square. So once breakfast/lunch/snack etc is finished I just shake the lumps of banana or whatever into the bin and give the lino a quick skoosh with the anti-bacterial stuff and a wipe down.

Posted on August 5th, 2006 in Top Tips with 2 Comments