use the baby-led weaning method

Not leaving this goal yet but I’m finally starting to think the weaning onto solids phase is over for us. We’ve even gained a bit of fame through the blog, I was interviewed in the Telegraph Magazine a couple of weeks ago, read the article here:

http://www.newbrowne.net/img/TelegraphBLW.jpg

So, the baby has been on solids for roughly 3 months and is happily feeding himself absolutely anything I happen to pass into his little paws. He’s lost a little bit of that baby fat now that he’s crawling like he had a little motor on his tail, but he’s still well on the charts & absolutely blooming.

I’ve been away for ages, I’ve just been working all my spare time and I haven’t had time to visit 43T. Now that the projects are finished (for the moment) I might return for a while, we’ll see how it goes…

I’m also in the process of creating a new baby-led weaning blog, the address is http://blwbaby.blogspot.com/ in case anyone is interested. Worth going just for the funny pics :) Oh and more BLW pictures at http://www.flickr.com/groups/babyledweaning/.

What does baby-led weaning mean?

In the context of introducing solid foods to a baby’s diet, baby-led weaning means

i) waiting until at least 6 months before giving any solids to the baby

ii) skipping the pureed stuff and offering the baby finger food so that they can self-feed straight away

Here’s a couple of links for the interested:

››UNICEF UK Baby Friendly Initiative 2002
››Weaning research article from Association of Breasfeeding Mothers
››Guidelines from a Dutch breastfeeding site

I know that we have already given the baby a taste of watermelon even though he was not 6 months yet, but this was also baby-led. :)

When he went for the slice of melon, I thought he’d lose interest in it as soon as he got the unfamiliar taste, but I was wrong (you’ve seen the evidence!). It was a one-off incident, and even though he shows all the signs of being ready for self-feeding, I think we’re going to wait for another couple of weeks (he will be 6 months on the 23rd).

At a coffee morning with other mothers from my NCT ante-natal group, I mentioned that I was going to try this “new” approach” called baby-led weaning, but didn’t want to start preaching to them as they are quite good in terms of awareness (plus one of them was shoveling puree into her 5-month-old at the time), and to my surprise they’d never heard of it before. The puree-shoveling mother even said: “Oh yeah, I’ve heard they do that a lot in Scandinavia”, which was all news to me…

Anyway, more about the whole idea and progress to follow.