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

Dinner

• 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.

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9-months BLW honest