So in the beginning it was all 'Wow, what's this green stuff? Broccoli? Really? Wonder what it tastes like?' etcetera etcetera. But now she's tasted a few things Babybear is beginning to let me know her likes and dislikes.

She's a bit off the broccoli, to be honest, but can't get enough apples. (It's very cute, we've put the fruit bowl on a low table and she goes and grabs an apple or a banana when she fancies one. Not that she can get them started without some help, I mean she is fairly gifted, obviously, but she's not that good...)

She has decided that she is over green beans but she still loves peas, frozen or cooked. Cauliflower she can take or leave. But then so can I. She seems to like all of her carbs, so she's delighted to eat pasta, bread and porridge, and happily chomps down on lentils, beans and meat. Steak is okay, pork is better but chicken, by god... she adores roast chicken, basically eating the meat off two legs of chicken the other night. I didn't hand her the whole leg, by the way, I am aware that she's not Henry VIII.

However carrot, my friends, is off the menu. Won't even touch it, bless her headstrong little socks.

Sorry about that.

It's not perfect, actually, as it only searches through the pieces that Morv and I have written, but it does at least get you started. And it brings up photos, which as we all know are the only bits of this site that people are really interested in...

So is everyone doing this, then? Morning and night?

HOW?

We probably manage to brush Babybear's teeth once a day, in her bath, but to be honest she very rarely lets me put the brush into her mouth so it's very much up to her how co-operative she wishes to be. Often she spends more time chewing the end of the brush than she does cleaning her teeth. We aren't using baby toothpaste because my friend told me that we shouldn't (although I've quite forgotten the reason, of course... possibly something to do with fluoride?) so I just rub the tiniest amount into the brush before handing it over. For some reason the mintiness takes her completely by surprise every time, but I try not to laugh too hard as I feel this could create the wrong mood.

This is far from a top tip, because I have actually come in search of top tips... but I do notice that if I am brushing my teeth at the same time things tend to go better. In  fact, the very best way to get her to do it is to allow her to steal my (very soft) toothbrush, but as I see her trusting little face turned up I do sometimes worry that I will be passing on germs that her immune system will collapse under. Still,  whatever works...

http://www.babycentre.co.uk/baby/startingsolids/babyledweaning/

It's fine, y'know, basically just a crib from the crazy Dutch website piece that Gill Rapley co-wrote and of course it's good to have more information out there... but they do stuff it up at one point when they get their resident Health Visitor to comment on BLW. Why oh why do they let these people interfere..?

Here's the paragraph, entitled:

"Are there any disadvantages to Baby Led Weaning?

"Not all foods can easily be made into baby-friendly finger shapes so your baby's diet may be rather limited, unless you are very inventive. Helen Pegg, BabyCentre's health visitor advises parents to include at least some mashed foods when they starting the weaning process. This allows you to give your baby a more varied diet."

Mashed foods - what? Mashed potato? Cos that's quite easily turned into a chip-shape, I find... oh, you want more varied than broccoli and asparagus and mangetout do you? Well, let me have a think about that. I am pretty inventive, you know...

Well, one thing that it might be useful to know is that the babies only need the chip-shaped thing for about a fortnight after which in my humble experience their motor control develops at an alarming rate and they stick their little hands round anything they can possibly get hold of.

That's big flakes of fish, that's steak, that's pasta shapes, that's bread with home-made chicken soup spooned over it, that's apricot, pear and peach bum-cheeks, pieces of chicken, green beans, baby corn, that's meatballs, moon biscuits, rice cakes, cucumber, apples, as well as the nutritionally essential car keys and television remote controls. Oh for goodness sakes, I know a lot of those things actually come in a chip-shape (green beans and baby corn, I'm thinking) but I am truly at a loss as to which foodstuffs this woman was talking about. Trust a bloody Health Visitor to come in at the end and bollocks things up...

Okay, I'm really not kidding, I want a list of foods that cannot be cut or moulded in such a way that a child of, say 7 months, wouldn't be able to eat. For the first month let's assume that you are mostly doing carrots, broccoli, banana, potato, cucumber, cheese, pasta, that sort of thing. Not that I was, but then as I said I am very inventive...

Here's mine.

1. Couscous.  Unless I slightly overcook it so that it goes a wee bit clumpy in which case it's fine. Babybear loves it with roast veggies, by the way... must write that up one day.

2. Rice Pudding. Only because we haven't had it yet, really, cos it's been summer. Obviously it's a staple of most jar-fed babies diets regardless of the season (I got a jar of Cow & Gate Organic rice pud free from Ikea which has a best before of July 2007... Jesus wept...) so poor Babybear has lived a life without cream and sugar and rice so far. I might make some now that the weather is turning, I bet she'd wolf it down now but at 7 months it might have been tricky.

3. Lentils. Well, you could get inventive on their ass and make them into some kind of burger I suppose but I am prepared to give Helen Pegg HV lentils. Until 8 months-ish, in Babybear's case, when she was able to grab them just fine.



Any more for any more? I'm not taking the piss, I really want to make up a list and send it to Babycentre so that future BLWers can see the foods which this method so cruelly excludes from our babies not-very-varied-diet, at least for a while.

Post-Script
Okay, so I have posted our puny list of 8 things that babies can't have on the Babycentre website, along with a polite explanation of the demerits of their Health Visitor's astronomical gaffe. Much to my embarrassment, however, it turns out that Babycentre don't let you put paragraph marks onto their pages (they do before you press 'submit', the eejits) so now my reasoned argument against mashing food for BLWers look like the spittle-flecked rantings of a lone crazy woman...

When I read the guidelines and tips for 'normal' weaning I see a lot of experts recommending dips for introducing babies to finger food, but I'd have to say that Babybear doesn't care for the dipping experience. I think she thinks it's a bit stupid... a retrograde step for one so obviously advanced...

So don't sweat it.

It really irritates me that so many Health Visitors I hear about seem to be making a virtue out of the fact that if you feed your babies puree 'you can have him on three meals a day within a fortnight'. Honest, my friend's HV told her that only last week.

I just don't understand what the rush is... is it not true that babies should be getting the bulk of their nutrients from their milk for the first 12 months? Did I pick that up wrong?

Well, I suppose that if I was spoon feeding my child every day while my own meal got cold then I'd be highly motivated to get onto the 'self-feeding' stage, but don't people who are doing baby led weaning get a free pass in that regard? Or is it just me who truly does not give a flying bollock how quickly Babybear takes to solids?

Now, I'm not saying that if she was refusing all food that I would be quite so relaxed, and I do understand that I am fortunate that she is prepared to give most things at least a try before letting them dangle precariously over the side of her highchair in the manner of a gangland boss dealing with a copper's nark. But if you read the BLW FAQ you will see that a lot, really, a lot of the Yahoo Group babies didn't take to self-feeding until they got to 12 months. Which is, not by coincidence I think, the same time as their milk needs to be supplemented...

So if you are new to BLW and freaking out because your friends' puree-fed babies seem to be wolfing down chickenandapricotandsweetpotato mush as fast as their mums can spoon it in, don't worry, your baby will get there when they are ready. To be perfectly honest Babybear rarely has three square meals a day and she's nearly ten months old, but that is I admit largely down to my lack of organisation. I reckon I've got another couple of months before I need to crack it so I'm not at all worried.

This is at the top of my mind because last night we had pasta with chorizo, tomato sauce and borlotti beans (well, Babybear didn't have the chorizo, to be fair) and those beans turned up in her nappy pretty much untouched this morning.

Obviously her poo has changed a good bit since the first carrot-y nappies, but the differences are not consistent. Sometimes it's yellow, sometimes darker towards brown, sometimes green...(look I know I'm coming off a bit Gillian McKeith here but you clicked on the link, you knew for sure I'd be talking about jobbies).

Anyway, I suppose I'm saying that after about three weeks of BLW, Babybear appeared to be digesting more of her food, as her poo became less milk-fed and runny so I assumed that in time her poo would, erm, toughen up.

However, she's 9-and-a-half months old now and we can still identify most of the food she's eatenafter it's passed through her digestive system. Things like breads, soft fruits and potatoes disappear for the most part, but grapes seem to pass through untouched, as do mushrooms, beans, lentils and I still see tell-tale orangey flecks of carrot and little bits of broccoli. Thing is, we'll never know what she would have been like if we had been feeding her puree...