Thoughts on baby-led weaning

Back when the Hungry Mouth only wanted milk and wasn’t keen on trying out solid food, I looked into a method of weaning (see ‘http://muslinmummy.blogspot.com/2008/11/baby-led-weaning.html') all about letting your child set the pace by only serving things the child can eat by herself. Basically for an under-one, that means finger-food.

But although finger-food could be fun for my daughter to play with (and occasionally nibble), and did not take much effort to prepare, she didn’t actually eat very much. (Peas were good for practising that pincer grip.) Compared to a bowlful of porridge, getting any kind of finger-food into a gummy little mouth with fumbly little fingers is incredibly inefficient. So even before she suddenly started taking an interest in actually using food to assuage hunger, we also offered her food that could be spooned…such as yoghurt, butternut soup, or spinach+potato+cream cheese. Meals could be over in ten minutes, spoon skills were speedily mastered, much stress (see ‘http://muslinmummy.blogspot.com/2009/08/one-day-on-one-day-off.html’) vanished from our lives.

So I don’t think we really ‘did’ BLW. I still quite like the idea, but it wasn’t a complete solution for us.