And Making a Mess While You’re Trying to Clean

This week we started weaning with Grace. Can't believe it but she is 6 months on Sunday. Despite being a wee little dot she is a very hungry baby. She stopped sleeping through the night a few weeks ago. I tried increasing her milk feeds....still hungry. I tried giving her the hungry baby milk...still hungry. The problem is that she wasn't really all that fussed about drinking more milk and so it was an uphill struggle to get her to eat enough to keen her going now she is getting more active. As she was approaching 6 months deciding to wean her wasn't a problem, but what would be an issue was the choice of weaning method.

You may remember that when we weaned Olivia we went with baby-led weaning. The problem we face with Grace is getting enough down her for her to be satisfied. With baby-led weaning you continue the normal milk feeds until the child is eating enough food and then start to reduce the milk as the food intake goes up. Problem was that Grace wasn't that fussed about drinking enough anyway. So, we have decided to do a mixed approach with Grace. She is self-feeding but is also having some spoon feeds of lumpy food. Her first meal was toast, which she really seems to love. She has also tried pasta, breast sticks, rice cakes, carrot, broccoli and banana whole and then various things I have cooked up for her such as sweet potato and lentil.

She seems much happier in the day time and is sleeping better during the night.

Watch Us Grin and Grin

Olivia is continuing to do very well with her eating...

Here she is going bananas for bananas!

This is what is technically known as a cheesy grin.

Olivia absolutely loooooooooooves cheese! She has organic mature cheddar based on the premise that if she will eat that she will also eat anything milder.

She also loves nectarines. When she first puts a bit if nectarine in her mouth she pulls a face like she is sucking a lemon, she takes it out, looks at it and then puts it back in. Then there follows a brief interlude of frantic sucking punctuated by happy little noises. Then when you really think she has bitten off more than she can chew she opens her mouth again and pulls out a big bit of nectarine skin which she has sucked all the flesh off.

Also popular at the moment are toast, carrots, broccoli, green beans, avacado, pitta bread and cauliflower.

I Taste the Food You Eat

This weekend we started weaning. As you may remember from previous posts we decided to go with Baby-Led Weaning, rather than start with pureed food. Well, we had a resoundingly successful weekend. She had lots of fun picking up, squashing, licking, sucking and chomping the food and even ate a little bit!

Here is Olivia enjoying her first meal. She had organic ricecakes and banana cut into sticks.

She seemed to be breaking little bits off and I could see little bits in her mouth which had gone next time she opened it so I guess she swallowed something :) For lunch she had carrot and toast fingers. I tried her with rice cakes with houmus but she didn't seem keen so we'll try that again another time. Tea was asparagus and broccoli 'trees' with plain ricecakes.

We happened to be away at my Mum's but to be honest I think this was good as Mum was sceptical about the whole B-LW thing but was surprised at how well Olivia managed, even with her first meal! I ate breakfast with her and then we had a big family lunch and dinner.

She also had her usual milk feeds. Not a puree in sight!

Eat All We Can

The other week Olivia and I went to a 'Wicked Weaning Workshop' at our local family centre with my NCT gang. I was expecting it to be just the basics on how to wean, purees etc. but it actually introduced a completely new concept I hadn't come across in any of my books or magazines - baby-led weaning (BLW). The idea of this is that rather than just pureeing everything and feeding the baby with a spoon, you offer the baby appropriate sizes pieces of fruit and veg and let them explore, taste, suck and learn to chew them. Basically you wait till the child is 6 months to start weaning and then skip the puree stage and go straight to finger foods.

My first instinct was that the child would surely choke but experts in this technique argue that actually they are more likely to choke when moving from the traditional stage 1 purees to the stage 2 puree with lumpy bits as they have learn to eat by sucking the food straight to the back of their mouths and haven't yet learned to deal with the lumps and basically inhale them. They argue that with BLW the child physically cannot move the food to the back of the throat until they are ready to actually swallow it. In the early days the baby will suck and gnaw on food and spit it back out. You continue with their normal milk feeds to ensure they get the energy they need until they start actually swallowing stuff and then you start reducing milk according to their demand. They may not be digesting much but are learning about tastes and textures of individual foods rather than pureed-up mush of lots of different foods. Experts argue that this makes the move to babies eating with the family quicker and makes for less fussy eaters as the child has control over what they eat. The more I find out about it the more I like it as an approach.

For anyone interested there is a great blog with excellent great photos, recipies and tips covering all aspects of BLW at:
http://babyledweaning.blogware.com/blog

As ever there is also a Yahoo group dedicated to the subject.
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/B-LW/

One thing which rather amused me (as well as making me a bit cross inside) was the reaction I got from the health visitor when I asked how I could get Olivia to feed herself lentils , as she will not be eating meat. The emergency 'HELP BAD PARENTING - SOMEONE CALL SOCIAL SERVICES' siren sounded and the room went into emergency lockdown at amber alert. 'What no meat at all' she said, face aghast. 'Um...no.. we don't eat it at home'. She and the other two ladies running the session looked at each other and didn't really have an answer. All she could come up with was 'well you can't give them Quorn till they are 2 you know' . I bit my tongue and resisted the temptation to correct her and say that it was actually not recommended under 3 on the Quorn website :) Apparently it is too low in fat and calories and fills a baby or toddler up without them getting enought nutrients.

Now we live in an affluent middle-class area, full of delis and farmers' markets and people who shop at Waitrose. I find it hard to believe that I am the first person ever to indicate that they intended not to feed their child meat but they looked so confused and stuck for an answer so I am obviously the first person ever in the history of the world to have a vegetarian baby. Do I get some sort of certificate or will social services be round to place her for adoption with a good upstanding steak-eating family by the end of the week? Luckily on the BLW blog I have found lots of recipes for lentil patties, tofu etc. Actually, I will also feed Olivia wild or organic fish since we do eat some fish at home. I don't object to her eating good quality, organic meat at her grandparents or somewhere - we just don't have meat at home.

Come on now all you parents out there - how did you start the weaning process, how did you find it; any tips? Please leave us comments as we would love to hear your weaning experiences.

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