Baby led weaning

Another month and the twins (my grandchildren) will be 6 months old and beginning 'baby led weaning' which involves feeding pieces of 'proper food' without salt or sugar rather than baby mush .

Anyone have experience of this feeding method?

When you say baby mush - do you mean stuff in jars or normal food blended down?

My nephews both at approx 5-6 months were very eager for normal food! Shelley just cooked off apples and pears or various veg and added some cooked meat, blitzed it down and they muched evry last part of it!

This will be the route we go down also with the baby as there is no point buying jarred food if you can just blitz down normal food! Its how we were all raised and we have good varied appetites.

I used to make my own fruit and veg purees to begin with then progressed on to chunkier foods and finger foods and then they used to eat the same as us expect mashed down a tad.

Can't keep up with all these new fangled ideas these days, my SIL had twins in January and she said six months for weaning, well i'm not that old, my eldest is 12 and we were told 4 months weaning. I weaned both of mine at 3 months, they were both big babies at 9,11 and 10lb so they were ready for it. I think sometimes people stick to rigidly to "the book" methods, they should go on there instincts sometimes.

6 months is the proposed age by The World Health Organisation as the bacteria and the gut is only fully developed by then.

before 5-6 months can increase the likelihood of cot death and all sorts of stomach bugs/infections etc.

All the Health Visitors i have spoken to (which have been many at Child Protection meetings) have all said earliest is 5 months as only then can the baby cope with soft mushy foods, and this is only if the baby is pushing for more food than milk...

Alex
xx

Well as i said it was 4 months when i had my two. I think it depends on the individual child anyway like everything else, no childs fits all the critieria the so called expert books say they should at a certain stage. Its parents discretion isn't it really, they know their child.

My babies were eating baby rice at around 8 wks..then were eating proper food around 6 months didn't have a posh name then..just hungry babies needing fed..

Doesn't time fly?! I did a sort of mixture of both solid and purees - I made some pureed fruits and veg (especially initially for hard things like carrot, apples and pears) in ice-cube trays but also fed a little solid food such as cooked broccoli and some fruits and plain rice cakes (they 'melt'). We didn't use purees for very long, if I remember. I never did anything like puree a whole dinner together; it was just to introduce individual tastes, then I moved onto mashed/chopped with some solid stuff. If I remember correctly, I think the first time she had meat was some chopped up turkey at Christmas when she was 6 months old and she could cope well with it.

I was very much 'led' by the baby and when she seemed ready to try food and started offering small tastes at 17 weeks. The only time I tried a baby jar was at the History Museum for convenience but she refused to touch it. We never bothered with baby rice etc. either but went straight onto normal rice and porridge instead of finely milled oats.

Hi Alexandra no not the stuff in jars (which tastes like wallpaper paste) or blended food .
I used to feed fresh food liquidised but that is not the same as 'baby led weaning' which is all about giving pieces of whole food to the baby under supervision ,things like fingers of steamed carrots/beans/broccoli/pasta/bread/fruit/sliced meat etc the idea is if the baby is feeding itself it doesn't choke.
The baby needs to be 6 months old and to begin with will still gets its nutritional requirement from milk and just explores the different tastes and textures of real food then progesses to eating it , there is never any need to puree food. I think it is a bit like BARF feeding dogs.

I am ordering a large plastic sheet for the kitchen floor, I think I am going to need it .

Hi LS that is more or less what I used to do but I did puree most things to begin with . I never fed 'bought' baby food and had a child who would eat anything and everything.

I think BLW is fairly new at least I hadn't heard of it until now and am just learning .

Mine were breast fed and also given a blended what we were having after about 5 or 6 months. The first grabbed a slice of melon on a picnic and another slurped happily on a Macdonalds Milk shake - thereby letting us know they were happy to start solids. I tried the baby foods once or twice, but the kids weren`t that impressed and they were really expensive for what you got.