Over the past few months we’ve seen Poppet do a few really funny things with food. There was the face planting on her tray to eat yoghurt, and the spaghetti dangle. But today she had us in absolute stitches with her inventiveness. Normally we use cloth bibs but we’d run out, so ‘G’ got out her solid plastic ‘pelican mouth’ bib. You know the kind, they have that scooped mouth at the bottom to catch falling food. Anyway, it kept Poppet entertained for a while – she spent ages gazing at the bits of dinner (meatloaf, peas, broccolli and mash) and then she lifted the bib, dropped her bottom lip underneath it, and lifted the bib some more. And hey presto! In rolled a pea, then some meatloaf 
Luckily I had my phone to hand so we managed to get some snaps the second time she did it. Soup for lunch tomorrow………!
Inventive Eating Part 1
Inventive Eating Part 2
Poppet has now wriggled her way past the 9 month mark and we’ve been doing baby led weaning for over 3 months, so we thought we would post a sort of review of BLW so far and how it’s worked for us.
The first month felt like a huge learning curve, her learning how to eat, us learning what shape and size to make her food so she could manage it, finally settling on ‘the bigger the better’. Forget melon sticks, she was happier with a proper man size wedge – actually I never did post about this before but giving your little one a proper slice of melon at the end of a messy meal is a great way to clean their face
Anyway the 1st month was full of foods like:
- Fruit sticks & wedges – cut big so she can hold with both hands
- Vegetable sticks & wedges
- Toast with various things on, eg soft veg, cheese etc
- Soups
- Yoghurt
..and through the 2nd and 3rd months our menu looks more like:
Breakfasts:
- Oatibix or Cheerios
- Fruit salad & yoghurt
- Toast with jam / marmite (she’s in the ‘love it’ category) / scrambled eggs
Lunches:
- Soup with dippers – toast / breadsticks / rice cakes / melon (really!)
- Pizza
- Good ol’ cheese on toast
- Cheese & Veggie muffins (thanks go to Nick & Archie at www.MyDaddyCooks.com for these!)
- Omelette with random veggies in
- Stuffed pittas
- Sardines on toast
- Ploughmans lunch – raw pepper slices, cheese sticks, bread sticks & philadelphia
- Beans on toast (Poppet has been known to eat every bean and leave the toast. That wasn’t the quickest lunch in the world!)
- Jacket potato with beans & cheese
Dinners:
- Stir fry – chunks of chicken or beef with baby sweetcorn, peppers, noodles
- Bolognese or any other minced base dish like cottage pie. Served with pasta / mash / peas / broccoli.
- Pasta anything – tomato type sauces with veggies, or salmon / brocolli & creme fraiche
- Beef stew with rice
- Lamb Stew with cous cous
- Chicken kiev, mash & veg
- Roast dinner – chicken / roast potatoes / roast veggies (carrots, sweet pots, parsnips, courgettes) and daddy’s yummy gravy!
- Fish fingers
- Meatloaf
- Fish cakes
- Chicken pies with sweetcorn & pastry on the top
Anytime snacks:
- Breadsticks & rice cakes with philadelphia or houmous
- Fruit – clementine pieces, apple slices, plum / mango /melon chunks, banana sticks / slices
- Yoghurt
- Spelt biscuits (she loves the apple or pomegranate ones from Plum organic)
Hopefully this list will help with ideas when you’re starting out. It’s all well and good saying ‘let them have a bit of what you’re having’ but if you’ve got into the habit of surviving on unhealthy shameful food that we won’t dare mention here you have a bit more thinking to do before you probably want to let your little one have any. That’s been one of the unforeseen benefits of BLW for us – we weren’t too unhealthy before but it’s made us more aware of what we’re feeding ourselves and it is just so much easier when we all have the same thing.
Now, we have never weaned any other way so I can’t compare BLW to ‘puree weaning’, I can only make a judgment based on what we’ve experienced and what other people have discussed with us.
In my opinion the negatives of BLW are:
- Less convenient at the beginning, easier to feed at home, whereas pureee + spoon is more mobile. i know lots of people will probably disagree with me but that’s how it felt for us.
- A bit more time and thought needs to go into the way the food is served so that your little one can manage it themselves. This gets easier really quickly.
- Feeling isolated because no one else around you seems to be doing it this way!
Positives of BLW are:
- More convenient in the medium term as you are free to get on with your own meal while your little one feeds themselves, whereas puree fed babys are still being spoon fed in general.
- Teaches your little one to feed themselves not just to eat. They learn to eat at the table and enjoy eating as a social skill.
So you might be surprised that I’ve only listed 2 positives against 3 negatives. BUT – I would think (comments welcome!) that if we had puree weaned poppet we would still have experienced the first 2 negatives but just later in the process. Probably about now actually, so it feels great that we’ve already got through the hard bits and basically she eats like us now.
I can’t claim that poppet won’t be a fussy eater, but at least we’ll know it wasn’t beacuse she wasn’t offered a variety of foods when she was weaned! For now she is really happy at mealtimes, tries everything at least once and has clearly fed herself enough as her weight gain has been really good. So for me, I can’t see us doing it any other way in the future.
In the first week or so of 2010 we ventured out for a big family lunch, the first time we’d really attempted a proper meal out since poppet started BLW. We decided to play it safe to start with and take a few bits and pieces with us that we knew she could munch on, particlularly if there was much of a wait for food – some breadsticks, a rice cake, and some mango chunks, plus her normal cup of water.
Those worked a treat at keeping her occupied once we’d placed our orders and the food didn’t take too long – she shared my fish, chips and peas (straight off the ultra clean table as there was no tray on the highchair) and she was great. She thoroughly enjoyed herself and left us free to enjoy our own meal. It was a really lovely moment – just over 8 months old and enjoying her first meal out. Definitely one of those ‘yay for blw’ moments Our tips – take a big pack of wipes for the inevitable clean up and a few spare muslins which you can throw down as floor mats.
The whole experience got me to thinking about baby led weaning in a way I probably haven’t for a while, so I am going to do a post in the next week or so summarising our blw experiences so far.
Eating out for the first time
When I started to read all about weaning I found much talk about the need to disguise vegetables so that your little one would eat them. Having then found various baby led weaning websites, and no mention whatsoever of disguising food we thought we’d take the easy option.
So we cleverly dressed a broccoli floret up like….. a broccoli floret, dressed a carrot up like a carrot and (this is my favourite) we disguised a baby sweetcorn as …. wait for it…. a baby sweetcorn. And she fell for it! Really! She ate the lot
Eh hem. Sarcasm over. My point is that sometimes it’s worth giving the little ones a chance to decide for themselves if they like veggies or not? If you don’t teach your baby they are supposed to dislike vegetables then maybe, just maybe, they’ll actually like them.
Poppet has just mastered her pincer grip so peas (and other tricky stuff) have been on the menu lately. She loves them to an almost obsessive point, and if we give her 5 different things to eat she’ll go with peas, more peas, more peas, more peas!! Now that she’s much better handling smaller items I have found myself relaxing so much more and she’s coping great – no gagging, she’s just really happy tucking in. New foods have been:
- beans on toast (she sometimes picks ALL the beans off, eats them, and leaves the toast!)
- mince with peas and carrots, often with pasta twirls or mash
- chunks of fruit rather than fingers – eg mango & nectarine pieces
She’s also started to pull larger bits of food apart and eat the smaller bits, as though she’s really enjoying her new found dexterity. We’re beginning to feel the benefits of BLW now – she’s almost 8 months old and really capable at feeding herself. We can’t imagine it any other way
More peas!
We eat quite a lot of foods that we just aren’t able to cut into wedges or shapes that poppet can pick up, like spaghetti bolognese and cottage pie, not to mention the obvious things like yoghurts and soups. She has just started to figure out that dipping her fingers and licking them works really well and she is now happily scooping runny foods up.
As much as this makes life a little easier it does make it messier still! Bath times are now a must straight after dinner, as are more substantial bibs. We’ve got a few of the long sleeved ones from Tescos and Mothercare that also have a waterproof backed front to them which definitely saves having to change her clothes too much, but they can be a bit of a faff to put on and I’ve found they stain really badly. we got a pack of large but sleeveless bibs from Boots recently, still with the waterproof backing, long enough to cover the top of poppet’s legs and they seem to survive the battering she gives them much better. Oh and they look lovely too!
Now she’s eating a little bit more and has become more confident and able she has started dropping stuff on the floor deliberately. Oh how we love this game *sigh*. Hopefully it won’t last too long!
Dropping everything for fun.
Oh my goodness the splatter effect. We had a new kitchen put in while I was pregnant and had the foresight to get gloss white (think ‘wipe clean’) cupboards and a tiled floor. And thank goodness we did because wipe clean they certainly have been, twice a day to be precise. Having said that we find meal times getting cleaner everyday. I use ‘cleaner’ in the loosest sense of the word but we remain ever optimistic, and as long as we keep a relaxed attitude to mealtimes we find ourselves laughing at the mess rather than getting stressed about it. The thing is, BLW or not, poppet just loves yoghurt and those other yoghurt style fruity puddings. We load the spoon up, hand it to her and away she goes.
We’ve now started using up an old packet of bin bags, ripped open, as floor mats and the post mealtime clean up is now much quicker. The walls will probably never be the same again but we have a spare pot of paint and one day we’ll use it!
Pre Loaded Spoons And Painting With Yoghurt
Now we’re past the 6 month mark we’ve moved on from plain old vegetable and fruit fingers. Well, little one still eats them but we’ve started offering much more in the way of ‘normal’ foods and for lunch she has what we have. I read about pizza toasts on one of the other blw forums, we gave them a go, and they are now a firm favourite, not just with poppet, but with us too. That’s one of the effects of baby led weaning that we hadn’t anticipated – we’ve found our diet improving and changing as we have to be ever mindful of salt / sugar content on her behalf, and so our meal times have become a little more creative, and a lovely family affair.
Pizza Toasts consist of a slice of wholemeal toast, a thin layer of tomato puree, grated cheese and carrot, plus whatever veggie bits you feel like adding – broccoli, leek, courgette etc. I still can’t believe how good they taste! – Yummity! score 5 out of 5!
She also really likes soup – we’ve had home made sweet potato soup, shop bought chunky vegetable and a few other veggie variations. We dip toast / breadsticks / rice cakes for her and then she munches away on those, and we also preload spoons (more on this later) and she feeds herself too.
We’ve also toasted pitta breads ready stuffed with the normal cheese / carrot toppings from above but do be wary of this as they get super hot and take ages to cool down. Our only concern this far is that poppet is in danger of turning into a piece of toast….. looking forward to her being able to use a pincer grip as I think we’ll probably be able to be more flexible then!
Let me start by saying I am not a health professional and I am only recounting my own experiences here rather than offering any advice. You are responsible for the safety of your baby, and my words are here as an account of my experiences only. I would recommend that you go on a first aid course and learn how to deal with a real choking incident – that way if it does happen you’ll know what to do.
We have found gagging really really horrible to watch but we are aware that it’s a necessary part of poppet learning to eat. I have gone through a stage of feeling panicky about the whole thing but as the other people on the Babycentre BLW board said to me, gagging is noisy, choking is quiet, so as long as you know she’s gagging sit on your hands and relax! And they were right – every time she gagged I was ready to jump up, flip her over and help her sort herself out but once I got used to letting her have that extra few seconds she’d deal with it and be halfway through the next mouthful of food by the time I’d recovered!
I’ve heard others say their babies only gagged once or twice and then never again but poppet seems quite prone to it. Satisfied that she is getting better bit by bit we are sticking with it and as long as she’s happy, we’re happy! I am very very much looking forward to it when she doesn’t gag anymore though…….
I’m sure there are others that are as good but many BLW’ers recommend this beauty, largely because it’s just so easy to keep clean – thank goodness!. It’s the Antilop high chair from Ikea, with optional tray and an inflatable pillow insert. It cost roughly £20 all in – bargain! I’d be interested to know if anyone else thinks there is another high chair as good (that’s as easy to clean!)? Click here for detailed info on the Ikea website.
