Following on from the Snacks question, what have we all found to be the best food to take out and about?

I'm rarely found without raisins about my person, which I'm not sure is such a brilliant thing as they are really just a big wallop of sugar, aren't they? Likewise rice-cakes, just the plain Cow & Gate ones and Moon Biscuits or oat cakes. They're the sort of things that live in my buggy bag for emergencies.

We are, I'm very glad to say, back to eating carrots so I often chop them up and bring them out. I have in desperation bough a bag of carrot batons at the supermarket but was most perturbed to see that the instructions said that you should wash them before eating them, which was not at all practical so Babybear and I lived most dangerously and scoffed the lot.

Cucumber is a straight no, banana a yes so long as she isn't eating in the buggy as it's tricky to get out of the upholstery. I'm trying madly to think of other things as we don't really take out lunch any more unless it's just a wee sarnie but I have fond memories of Moomin's Onion Bhajis on the move.

Anything else? There must be loads of foods that I've forgotten about that were great for those endless maternity leave coffee mornings...

Another general poll-type question removed from the comment bit by emergency 'copter...
I'll post it now and give my answers later as I'm a bit pressed for time right now.





With regards to snacks - this may sound like an obvious question (and let's face it probably is...) what sort of a snack/mealtime timetable to you do? At the mo we do breakfast 8 am ish, lunch 12-12.30 pm ish, snack mid afternoon, evening meal at 5-5.30 pm ish. But after huge snack tantrum yesterday I'm wondering if that isn't enough?????

The other day she put away a whole hot cross bun (a lovely organic one full of sultanas which she liberated from the rest of the bun and ate separately) in the afternoon and then didn't really eat her meal later...... "

I'm re-posting this for Mij. It's an interesting one, as it rather challenges what we are doing with BLW. My answer, to be honest, is just to offer a few things. But veg for veg, fruit for fruit. And to my mind, it's not the eating that counts, it's the trying. So long as Babybear has lifted something to her mouth a couple of times then she's as entitled as I am not to like it.

Until she was one, I genuinely never bothered as I knew that Babybear would drink as much milk as she needed so she was in no way being deprived. I think that now I am more conscious that she gets protein, carbs etc but I've stuck to counting things up over a few days rather than every day. This means that she eats a lot of broccoli and peas, in reality, but if we are having salad she is always offered some.  I don't think that's the worst thing in the world, though, a lot of mothers of 16-month-olds would be delighted to have a baby who eats broccoli.

Anyway, he're Mij's post.

"What do you do when babe is not interested in what you're offering?

What are a few of your favourites?

I'd like to start with:

'Your baby will sleep through the night'

Er, my baby did sleep through the night, right up until the moment that she started eating solids. Thank God it didn't take too long for her to re-settle.



'You have to start with mild flavours'

Gawd, no. You should see Babybear's face when confronted with mild cheddar. She just point blank refuses, absolutely disgusted that something which looks like delicious mature cheddar would taste like whipped milky fat.


Any others? Apart from, of course, the obvious...

'You've got to start with purees, so they can get used to the idea of eating.'

Waaaahahaaaah.

Frankly I think they're the best thing on the blog... I'm loving reading about everyone else's experiences and I've had good feedback from newbies that they are enjoying them too.

So my question is, where should I put them? They're in Random Thoughts at the mo but should I put up another folder and if so what should I call it? Or should I put them into the FAQ? Actually, should  we think about doing our own FAQ? We surely must know enough by now...

Plus, any questions that you have that might make a good wee 'poll'... send them to my email and I'll post them up.

Okay, so this has been debated endlessly on Mumsnet but I just wanted to take a wee poll of what we think about spoons?

As it happens I never spoon fed Babybear but that was largely because it wasn't necessary as she was wolfing down everything she could get her mitts on. I did give her yoghurt sometimes, and very occasionally she stuck her mouth onto the spoon before grabbing it off me, but generally speaking she has always torn any cutlery out of my hand before I could get it near her lips.

I was saying to someone the other day in the comments section, however, that the whole BLW thing is based on such a teensy study so I wouldn't recommend getting any knickers in a twist about using a spoon if it is done in a respectful way. And yes, I am well aware that my use of the word respectful is wanky...

I suppose I think that so long as you are respecting the child's boundaries, not persisting beyond a point where the child appears disinclined to eat, not employing stoopid distraction techniques or tricks and not doing anything that might be described by yourself or a dispassionate observer as shovelling - then what's the harm? Seems to me that the main thrust of BLW is about self-feeding rather than spoon-feeding, that's for sure, and that finger food should definitely make up the bulk of the baby's diet but a little bit of spoon-feeding isn't going to put an end to that, is it? Or is it? What do you all think?

Thinking about it, though, I reckon that the motivation to spoon-feed might also be important... I wonder if doing it 'because you're in a hurry to get your other children to school' would be counter to the BLW thinking, even if it is necessary to your happy family life? And should we evern be talking in terms of 'BLW thinking'? Or is it a philosophy? Or are they guidelines? Am I over-thinking this?

PS. I'm still over-thinking this and it's the next day...
I remember one of the first and most vicious arguments about puree vs BLW came about on Mumsnet after a woman had posted that her child had been enthusiastically self-feeding for a month or so and then had halted abruptly and was refusing to pick up any food. As I recall, my thoughts were along the lines of 'maybe he's teething or sickening for something' so just keep giving him the milk and offer food maybe once a day and see how that goes. Understandably, other people said (or kinda screamed) 'WHY DON'T YOU JUST SPOON-FEED?' because they felt that the baby was being somehow deprived. Which I really, really do not think was the case. So I suppose what I'm saying is... I don't have a problem with spoons until such times as your baby appears to be saying a straight no to food. I'm assuming no disability, by the way, as obviously that would make things different... although if they were getting limitless milk then presumably you would be able to spot the problem at some point in the first year. Hhhmm. Still thinking...

I'm asking because it seems like there is a perception that your baby must have teeth in order to chew. As far as I recall, Babybear's teeth hadn't started coming in when she started solids, although the two bottom ones appeared very soon after.

As it happens, when she is teething she tends to go through a period of non-eating (by which I mean no food apart from pesto, pasta and frozen peas - lord knows there would have to be something terribly wrong for her to she stop eating that).

However, once the teeth were beginning to cut I found that she enjoyed something quite tough like a big crust of bread or hunk of steak and I rather got the impression that this helped the teeth to break through.

To those of you just starting out, if you think about it the teeth are there already, they're just encased in gum. So it simply isn't the same as watching your granny struggle with a lamb chop, because by that time her teeth have gone.