Baby led weaning

The main idea behind baby led weaning is to trust your baby to make good food choices by providing them with a range of foods that they can eat at each meal.  Their instinctive needs and likes and dislikes will drive their food choices.  Although each individual meal may not look balanced as babies often favour  just one or two food groups, their overall diet will tend toward being balanced over the course of a few days.

I decided to give baby led weaning a go with Ellie. Certain aspects of it were not that dissimilar to the way that I introduced solids with the other three.  I started them all at around six months when they were old enough to be able to sit up by themselves and to be able to hold onto food.  A lot of the food was finger food, but I did use some purees as well.

I remember the first thing that I fed Sarah was rice cereal, which promptly set like concrete inside her and she had great difficulty passing it out the other end.  Evan presented problems as he had eczema and I wanted to be very careful which foods I introduced and in which order.  The thinking back then was to introduce foods one at a time and wait a few days to see if there was a reaction before introducing the next food.  This was rather time consuming and I can remember us getting stuck with just eating pumpkin for a very long period of time.  Not surprisingly, he is not that fussed on pumpkin to this day. With Harry I don't remember too much about the solids stage except that it was really messy, and with carpet under the dining table I spent a lot of time on my hands and knees scrubbing it clean again.

Ellie, like Evan suffered eczema, so I was a little dubious about introducing foods haphazardly and simultaneously.  But if I was going to give this baby led weaning a go, that was what I had to do.  I must say that I got a pleasant surprise, with the introduction of food, far from getting worse as I had feared, her eczema improved.  Now she has very little eczema, so I was wondering if a restricted diet could have been the cause rather than the cure.

To start with very little if any food goes down. By handing baby chunks of fruits and vegetables they either taste them or toss them depending on their mood.  At first, Ellie was quite suspicious of this food thing, as when she shook it, it didn't make a noise.  Once she got past that she would then feel it by squishing it in her hand. As she was used to handling toys, she preferred foods that were nice and solid.  Banana, initially, was way too squishy and she wasn't interested in that at all.

The thing that mainly worries mums about baby led weaning is the fear of baby choking on a piece of food.  Obviously, you don't leave baby alone with food, but also,try not to be overly protective and watch them obsessively either.  Yes, it's true babies do gag their way through for the first few weeks.  This can be a little hair raising, but it's worth remembering that the gag reflex is a protective one, and it is natural.  It actually stops them from choking, so if you hear the gag reflex in action you know that baby is doing exactly the right thing and learning how to deal with chunks of food in her mouth. The gag reflex in a six month old baby is quite a long way forward in the mouth, about half way along the tongue.  I watched Ellie gag on a small piece of food and when I looked into her mouth I could clearly see the food sitting about halfway back in her mouth and no where near the windpipe. What she was doing was biting small pieces of food off, moving it around her mouth with her tongue, if it went in too far she'd gag it back to the front, and then she'd use her tongue thrust to push the food out of her mouth when she had finished with it.  She really wasn't bringing anything to the back of her mouth to be swallowed in the beginning.

This is where continuing with milk feeds is still so important.  You may have 'officially started solids' but the amount that baby is actually eating is negligible. Again, this means you need to trust your baby  and give her time to be able to learn how to eat, because this is exactly what she is doing.  Eating is a many step process and she needs to learn each one and also start to associate this food concept with the concept of hunger.  For Ellie, this took until she was about 9 months before she really started to 'need' food. Her nappies were still predominately consisting of the breastfeeding poo, nice and sweet smelling, with chunks of undigested food in them. Around nine months she started to pass some smellier poohs and she started to be really hungry for food.  Breast milk was still making up the majority of her diet but it became evident that it was no longer enough.

The great thing about baby led weaning is that baby eats what the family is eating.  It is so easy to just put a little aside on a plate for baby.  They sit up with the family and share meal times and they enjoy being a part of family life.  Basically, anything goes with food, so long as you are mindful about keeping it healthy and avoiding junk food.  Spicy food may need to be used with caution too, but that's not to say we haven't tried it on Ellie with some funny results. One meal laden with chilli made her bounce up and down in her seat and we could almost see the proverbial steam coming out of her ears. Ooops, maybe that was a bit too hot, mental note to tone it down a bit next time.
How we wish we'd had the camera handy that time!