Baby Led Weaning
Baby led weaning is a method to start food. It is not weaning at all - you keep breastfeeding and breastmilk is the primary nutrition for the first year. It works if you are a breastfeeding mama.
The method is simple. You offer your child whole foods after six months of age. That means no pureed food. No forced spoon feeding or even a suggestion thereof. As long as you offer your baby reasonable food - sizable chunks of soft enough edibles, until they develop their pincer grip - the research shows they cannot choke (http://www.rapleyweaning.com/assets/blw_guidelines.pdf).
Sounded great to me and it has been. With a few tweaks.
So far this adventure has meant trusting Ruya’s innate wisdom. She gets to decide on what she wants to eat, how much and when. So if she isn’t into a food or eating when I offer her food, I support her choice. It has been transformative for me - I am learning to trust my body at the same time. While I teach her to eat I am relearning to feed myself too.
We started on the perfect baby food, avocado. Then came cucumber, pumpkin, carrot, banana, pear, apple and her all time favorite, broccoli. We always share the meal, which means I get to eat too and regularly. So what I eat she is learning to eat, which is mostly steamed veg, salad, dairy, a bit of grain, no meat and eventually fish. Once I got more relaxed, after two weeks, I offered her egg yolk and yogurt. We initially scrambled the egg but that just frustrated her, so now we hard boil the egg so she can grab more of the yolk. For yogurt I used the thick stuff - I love full cream everything - and loaded a small silver spoon for her, handed it to her and let her put it in her mouth and decide if she wanted more. She loved it. She took the spoon well the first time and almost always aimed for her mouth. Her food is placed in a porcelain bowl, no plastic.
The two biggest learning’s so far are about mess and being on the move.
The mess is intense. No way around it. I am super clean so this challenged my edges somewhat. But it has been so good for me to let go and just let Ruya make a beautiful mess as she loves and explores her food. Sometimes I strip her down to a diaper, mostly I put a bib on, roll up her sleeves and just let it happen. It has been amazing in two weeks witnessing how fast she is learning to manage her food. The mess is already getting easier. I try to make wash up fun, sing a song and teach her to put her hands under the tap.
Being on the move means very little to no baby paraphernalia. We have started off with a high chair but in a week I lose that. I heard about a portable option but in the meantime I have been getting experimental. Sometimes I use the high chair but mostly she sits on my lap or the table. If she is on the table I have to raise her bowl to her or hand her a chunk of food. On my lap she eats off my plate. When we are on the move during the day I offer her banana or an apple, cucumber can easily be grabbed off a salad bar. I usually eat the peel of the apple, passing the apple between us as we slowly finish it together.
Starting this method is hard work. There is a lot of cleaning, prep and learning curves. But the rapidity with which she is learning to feed herself is incredible. Well worth the work. Not to mention her palate which is diversifying every day. Today she dived into avocado, broccoli and finished her lunch with a bit of goat milk feta.
This is an adventure to be continued.
