I'm wondering what it was that first attracted you to the idea of BLW and when you first heard of it, bearing in mind that it is still quite a weirdy thing to do.

I remember that I overheard my friends talking about an article in a baby magazine and caught the magic words 'no puree'. I have no idea why I was dreading weaning my baby so much, other than a morbid fear of being bossed about by women with big hair and 'systems', but when I got home and found Gill Rapley's Unicef page and Stefan's crazy Dutch website I was so relieved. I just knew that BLW was for us. Luckily my DH is an obliging fellow and agreed that we should give it a try.

The more I think about it, the more I wonder if it was all related to my struggle to breastfeed, and all those months of mix feeding and later formula feeding on demand? I was never able to answer the Health Visitor when she asked how much milk Babybear had taken, or how often she was feeding, as it wasn't something I paid much attention to. Because I felt that was at least mimicking demand breastfeeding, she just got what she wanted. (We are creating a monster, I know...)

Now bear in mind that I really am thinking about this for the first time, so don't hold me to any of this, but I think that what really clicked with me was the easy-oasyness of BLW. I loved the idea that I wouldn't have to stress about the amounts, and I loved that Babybear wouldn't have to start at 6 months on the dot if she didn't want to. It all just seemed to make so much sense...

Anyone else?

Jeni's just asked about this on the comments bit and it is interesting as it may be the first time that some of us ever used a spoon - it was in our case. Babybear hated being given medicine, and always made a grab for the spoon, thus flinging the sticky pink contents all over the carpet, curtains and walls. (Do I sound bitter? Let's just say that the colour was just one of the reasons that I switched from Calpol to the blessedly clear Medised.)

I've found, through trial and error, that the best place to give her medicine is in the bath. Not great for antibiotics, granted, but for painkillers before bed it's not a bad place to start. It's less stressful as you don't care about spillage and I wonder if that transmits to the baby somehow?

Also, Babybear definitely prefers the deeper spoons (I can't remember what they came with, sorry) rather than the standard issue shallow graduated ones. And if I try to give it to her directly I get nowhere as she prefers to lean forward (while playing with Mr Ducky and pals) and schlurp it from the side of the spoon. It takes a few goes and she's had the lot. So that's as far as I've got, any other ideas gratefully received. Especially if you have worked out a way to get eye drops into them...

I've been talking to a woman on Mumsnet whose dad is something of an expert in nutrition. A 'world expert', no less...

Anyway, she says that her dad is a real stickler for her and her baby taking a multivit every day, the thinking being that whatever they don't need will be excreted anyway so where's the harm? Optimum nutrition versus adequate nutrition and all that...

So I thought I'd buy some for Babybear to see what she thinks, and her answer so far has been 'take that weird orangey-flavoured stuff away from me'. I tried mixing it in to a yoghurt, but she knew immediately that I was trying to pull a fast one and stuffed her fist into the pot, sending the contents flying.

I'm still not sure she even needs them, to be honest, but I'm open to opinion. And then I need to ask if i can just go ahead and give her the chewy ones that say 'age 3 and up'?

There seem to be a lot of people starting off about now (welcome, ladies...) so I thought that if we could all rack our soggy memories for what we recall about the early days that might be a fun idea.

I'll start...

Urm.

She farted. Like, for the first time since she was very wee the farts seemed to go on for ever.

And the poos. They started to smell rather rank. But for Babybear, they still kept that newborn consistency for months and months. Plus the food did not dissolve for ages either. It was like watching the Generation Game conveyor belt in our house, with me and DH shouting 'oooh, carrot, carrot', 'grape skin', 'apricot skin' 'resuscitated sultana' etc etc. The fruit skins often go black, by the way, which is most unnerving. And then of course the 'oh jesuschrist, come quick, the baby's got worms' when she did her first banana poo.

Sorry to disappoint on this as well, but contrary to what every Health Visitor in the coutnry seems to think, her sleeping did Not Improve when she was weaned. It Got Worse. Having said that, she'd been sleeping all night since she was about 8 weeks old so we couldn't exactly have got better. It took a few weeks to readjust and then got fine again. Until she got to 10 months and her naps went a bit weird but that was because I was giving her food too close to bedtime I think, and her tummy was getting full of veg rather than yummy calorific, soporific milk.

Anything else? I'm sure I've forgotten loads...

I'm asking this because on Mumsnet recently there have been endless threads about how people who do BLW are 'too rigid', 'pretend they are superior', 'aren't open-minded', don't actually respond to their childrens' perceived desire to be spoon fed etcetera etcetera. A lot of the discussion seems to centre around the term 'baby-led' specifically, which people (not BLWers) are interpreting as 'doing whatever method of feeding you think your baby wants, including spoon feeding if the baby has been spoon fed and preferred it'. Which is, to me at least, being 'baby-led' in the sense that everything you do is baby-led if you're a parent, but not Baby-Led Weaning as it relates to the research and the concept.

To be honest, I can't really be bothered getting into it on Mumsnet again, as it's all getting far too attritional but I'm interested in finding out what the term means to you lot. To me, it's simply a slightly cheesy descriptor for the concept of BLW, that you pretty much don't spoon feed, instead preferring to let the child pick up food and explore taste, weight and texture, eating what they want and then squdging the rest through their fingers if need be. And that as parents we don't panic that they're not getting enough food.

Because I've always been confident that milk would make up the bulk of DD's nutrition I've never spoon fed her, but that's not really an ideological stance against spoons, just a matter of having read the Rapley research and thought 'that seems to make sense to me, I'll give that a try' and then never feeling the need to spoon feed her as she was demonstrably capable of feeding herself.

So, what do you think? Am I being too irritable in thinking that it's ludicrous to get hung up on the BL of BLW, when it's quite clearly the concept that counts and not the name?