Wonder Baby having her first solids. In retrospect, raspberries were a rather messy choice.

Three weeks ago, Wonder Baby hit the six month mark.  A pretty big deal for a baby — she’s past that little, helpless infant stage, and is into a much more active stage.  She’s mobile (although rather slowly and mostly backwards), she’s curious about eeeverything, and she’s started eating solids.  I wrote previously about our experiences with Toddler Girl and Baby Led Weaning, but as we started over again with Wonder Baby, I had to take a moment and rethink it all.  The idea of BLW is that your baby eats what you eat.  It’s great for nutrition (providing you eat well) and for helping them learn to love a variety of food.  So if you ask a mom who does BLW what she feeds her child, she will usually say “oh, whatever we have for the meal”  This is the end result, but not the starting point.  I’m sure that most of us can agree that there are things a six month old might find a wee bit tricky. Soup, for example.

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Here are some tips for starting out with Baby Led Weaning.  I’m assuming that you are starting with a six month old, but I’m sure that most of these things would be true if you started a bit later.  I should add that I’m obviously not a pediatrician, I’m just a mom who’s fed two babies, so take what you want from it!

 

Setting up

You need a high chair that they can sit up in well.  If they don’t sit well in your high chair, you can start with a bumbo and tray.  Wonder Baby was only in the bumbo until I could get a second Fisher Price booster (Toddler Girl is still in hers); she wasn’t sitting reliably sitting on her own yet, but was fine in the booster.  The bumbo works, but it’s messy.  The tray is rather far from the baby’s body, giving the food lots of space to fall, and the edges aren’t high enough to keep food on the tray.

I love that both my girls started BLW in the summer because I was able to just have them in a diaper. It’s easier to clean a baby than do more laundry. In colder weather, I like to use a full sleeve bib.  We have the ones from Ikea because they are super cheap.  I have never once used a standard bib with my girls — there’s just no point, BLW is too messy.  Some people use a floor mat under the high chair to avoid having to clean the floor everyday.  This is smart, but I just clean my floor. I kind of wish I had a puppy just for helping clean up the scraps everywhere.  Can you rent puppies by the hour?

Allergies and digestion

I routinely horrify other mothers by feeding my baby things like eggs and oranges.  I’m not worried about allergies.  My family doctor told me that recent evidence points to allergies actually being worse in children who are exposed to foods after their first birthday.  She says that if you don’t have a family history of allergies, you shouldn’t worry; just keep a general eye out for a reaction.  Everything I’ve read about traditional diets and real food backs this up.  I’m not going to feed the baby a whole ton of potential allergens for the first time in one meal (shellfish with oranges dipped in peanut butter, anyone?), but I also can’t see any reason to only feed her carrots for a week before starting peas.  Are there a lot of babies allergic to carrots?

That said, I think it’s wise to hold off on wheat and uncultured dairy (cow’s milk bad, yogurt good) until a year or so, just because babies’ digestive systems can’t break them down very well yet.  I also try to avoid grain in general as I feel it just fills them up without offering much nutrition.  If I’m feeding her something to replace my milk (the perfect food) it better be worth it!  This is not to say that the occasional bit of rice pasta doesn’t sneak in, but I try really hard to aim for meat and veggies.  Also, if your baby is breastfed, it’s good to feed them high iron foods at this age.

Making it safe

First off, it’s good to know the difference between gagging and choking.  Babies have a crazy good gag reflex; it’s a survival thing.  If they get a bit of food on the back of their tongue, they will probably start gagging.  Until they perfect swallowing solids, this can happen fairly often. It depends on the baby.  That said, I really recommend taking a course on infant CPR, which will also cover choking.  I think this is wise for any parent, no matter how you feed your baby, but it helps you be confident to know that gagging is different.  Don’t freak out and start the heimlich maneuver.

Wonder Baby is gagging a whole lot less that Toddler Girl did.  I think this is partly because they are different babies, but I also learned a lot about what’s the easiest things to start out with.  Remember that most six month olds don’t have much for teeth, and it’s going to be a while before those handy molars come in.  You want food that is easy to hold but also easy to gum up into a mush.  Peel everything.  Even if it’s cooked, you should peel it.  Peels are harder to chew through and can be kind of half swallowed, and then trigger a gag reflex.  It’s super gross.  Wait until they have top and bottom teeth before you let them have things with peels.  Along the same lines, avoid things like spaghetti, lettuce, and anything long and skinny that might be hard to bite into little bits.  Alway cut anything round (such as grapes, hot dogs, blueberries) in half or squish them so that they aren’t that perfect choking shape.

So what do you feed them, then?

Here’s my list.  Maybe it will give you some ideas.  Some of these are crazy messy, but such is the price of learning to eat.  She usually goes straight to the bath after a messy meal.

– Soft peeled fruit or veggies:  peaches, plums, avocado, soft pears, the core of a cucumber, watermelon.

– Cooked until soft (and peeled!) fruit and veggies: carrot sticks, potatoes (boiled, not roasted), apple slices, beets (remember that they poo purple later!), squash, yams.  Cut the corn off a cooked cob and let them gum away at the bits that are left.

– Protein: Ground meat in patties are fantastic.  We do hamburgers, lamb burgers, any other kind of burger… meatballs, fish cakes.  In that line, other related things like homemade veggie burger patties or falafel are great.  Big chunks of scrambled eggs (both my girls eat eggs for breakfast every morning, they loooove them).  Bones with some meat on them… this sounds odd but if you cut your meat off the bone (for your toddler, perhaps?) and there’s a bit left on it, babies love to gnaw away.   They get bits of meat but can easily hold it.  Obviously I mean a big bone, like a drumstick, not a sharp little wing bone.

– Occasionally: pieces of rice cakes, rice pasta with sauce (like rice rotinni or penne, not vermicelli), cheese cut into sticks (like a soft cheddar, nothing too hard or stringy).

I also feed her with a spoon if we are eating something that easier to eat with a spoon (yogurt, applesauce, soup), and I sometimes scoop up the little bits left on her tray with a spoon to feed her.  It’s not like using a spoon occasionally is going to hurt them in some way.

Remember, this is just to get them started. Your baby will gradually start to eat more and more foods as they gain skill and teeth.  You’ll blink and they’ll be two and a half, eating with utensils (usually) and telling you about their favourite foods.  On that note, I leave you with a shot of my first baby.  Here’s Toddler Girl enjoying what appears to be a breakfast sausage with apple sauce?  She was loving it, whatever it is!

I hope this helps!  If you’re a veteran BLW parent, leave your advice on starting out in the comments, and be sure to ask if you have any questions I didn’t cover.

Baby Led Weaning part 4 of 11

1. Baby-Led Weaning by Food
2. BLW Gear Faves & Fails by Mrs. Stroller
3. BLW - The First Few Months by Mrs. Stroller
4. Getting Started With Baby Led Weaning by Mrs. Superhero
5. Baby Led Weaning by Mrs. Superhero
6. Getting Started with Solids, Purees, and Baby-led Weaning by Mrs. Bee
7. Time for Big-Boy Food by Mrs. Yoyo
8. My Modified Baby-Led Weaning Approach by Mrs. Pen
9. Little Tea Cup versus the spoon - part 2 - favourite first finger foods by Mrs. Tea
10. Starting Solids with Baby Led Weaning: A Conservative Approach by Mrs. Markers
11. Starting Baby Led Weaning by Mrs. Chipmunk