and I know it's got kinda fugly. Sorry about that. It's just that with all the info down one side I was concerned it was too cramped. Give the three-column thing a chance for 48 hours or so but then if you still think it's horrible post a comment here and I'll change it back.

...thanks to bossy Mrs Rachel who was desperate enough to communicate her delight in these spooky little mini-ears to put a comment on the blessedly irrelevant Smoked Salmon post.

Now, obviously this isn't a message board, but I'm really delighted to see that conversations are breaking out nevertheless (where there are women...) so what I thought I'd do is make a folder where you can post Original Thoughts (or Thoughts Plagiarised from other Websites, I'm not fussed).

Because the fact is that there are women on this site already who know A LOT MORE about this whole baby led weaning lark than I do, having done it for a while, so I for one don't want to miss out on anything they have to say. And I'd love to pick your brains for more recipes, so if you want me to post them up for you in the manner of Hub2dee's and Mawbroon's recent offerings then send me an email. You'll find my address if you click on my name, I'd rather not print it here as I get more than enough offers of performance-enhancing pills as it is...

So post comments below or send an email and I'll check them first thing for random musings and instructions, Challenge Anneka-style. I'll be the one in the luminous jumpsuit (superfluous British television reference there, American chums).  Thanks in advance for your thoughts.

Great, you do that. Knock yourself out. But it's not baby led weaning you're doing, my friend, that's spoon feeding with some finger food.

Now, I'm not here to offend anyone, but it does need saying. I'm not against spoons, in fact I'm rather fond of them (particularly dessert spoons) and am keen that Babybear learns to use one at some point. Right now she's eight months old and if she wants to feed herself off a spoon then fabulous, or if I load up a spoon and she leans forward to take the food that's equally marvy.

Shoveling it in, however, is really not on in my opinion because the title Baby Led Weaning, while admittedly a touch cringeworthy, is not formed from three words plucked at random. If you want your child to 'lead' their own weaning then you have to trust that they know what they are doing. It does require something of a mental gear change, I understand, from the whole 'three-meals-a-day' thing that we are all used to, but it is a shift worth making.

So all of this means that if the babies seem to be saying that they aren't particularly hungry for solids at that particular moment, feel free to back off. Sometimes Babybear really surprises me by not fancying her favourite food, but if that's the case then I have to acknowledge that it's her stomach and her appetite and she knows best. On those days, she will generally take more milk to compensate, which is fair enough as she must know that the milk is higher in calories than even the tastiest broccoli tree. Perhaps it's her way of handling a wee growth spurt, who knows? It's not up to me, she's the baby and she is leading this weaning malarkey.



P.S. That, by the way, is as hippyish and child-centred as I ever intend to get. i started this whole baby led weaning thing because I am too lazy to puree, for goodness sakes...

Who needs an alarm clock? Not me, baby...

I'd have to say that Babybear is an excellent sleeper (although she is currently playing with her baby gym beside me and it's nearly 1am sowhat'sallthatabout?) but her parents are a couple of disorganised layabouts who like to stay up late and get up later. So we obviously knew from the minute I peed on the stick that we weren't going to be following any strict childcare regime. (Well, that and the fact that the likes of Gina Ford's routine is SO badly written that it makes your skin itch. Say what you like about letting babies cry it out - and I'd prefer you say that it's unnecessarily cruel - but, my GOD that woman's writing gave me the heebie-jeebies.)

So when she was first born, we consciously decided not to stress about Babybear's sleeping habits, so once we got throught the first six weeks of constant night-time breastfeeding, we all used to go to bed as a family at about 12midnight and watched DVDs while I breastfed and the bub dropped off at about 1am. She would then generally sleep 'til 9 or 10am, the good little sausage. (Actually, these were pretty much the hours I kept while pregnant, which I don't think can be a coincidence).

It was the baby herself who dialled that back to 11pm, then 9pm then 7.30pm and more recently since weaning her we've noticed that she needs to go to bed at 6.30pm if we want to avoid that hellish 'over-tired' thing. (That bloody Vauxhall advert has so re-programmed the Husband's puny brain that he cannot pronounce it any other way than 'ooooveh-tiad' so for that reason alone I find it's best to get the baby down before she gets to that stage. )

I'm not sure if it got worse because of weaning, teething, or learning to crawl so that she is now more fatigued, but we did have a bad spell quite recently where she was just roaring with pain and exhaustion for a couple of hours at night - bearing in mind we have been so spoilt we thought our world was coming to an end - and it took us a while and a few frantic 'help me oh dear god help me' posts on Mumsnet before we got to the bottom of it and decided that we were feeding her solids too close to her last milk feed. See, you knew this would come back to baby led weaning eventually, you just had to stick with me...

So for interest I can tell you that I tend to treat her milk feeds and solids as something quite different to her solids, and insofar as we have a schedule it goes a little seomthing like this:

She normally wakes up at 7.52am - you think I'm kidding? - has a bottle at about 8-ish, then solids (cheese, porridge pancakes, peaches) at 9-ish then a bath or a wipe-up and another bottle before another nap from about 10 or 11 till 12-ish or 1-ish...

Then some snacks (rice cakes, a banana, Organix moon biscuits and her water) as we are out and about and probably another bottle after an afternoon nap in the buggy, then if we are at home she has some solids (fruit, pasta, whatever is around) at 4 ish and then her last bottle at 6-ish.

It's all very -ish, isn't it? But basically all I am saying is that if I want her to drink her bottles properly I know I have to leave a good couple of hours without snacks. And even at that her daytime bottles are often left half-empty... which I have just had to chill right out about because as you know, baby led weaning is all about responding to the child's cues, not your poxy paranoia that they are about to starve to death...

Well, chip-sized obviously... I mean, durrrr.

Although... it has been pointed out to me that a chip in the US is what we in sunny Glasgow call a crisp. Why? Because it is crisp, my friends. We are but simple souls.

In the States and Australia and no doubt other wrong-thinking young upstart countries, they made a wee mistake and called them chips, despite the fact that they are more slice-like in character. (Listen, don't get me started, in Australia they call chips 'hot chips', they call sweeties 'lollies' and if you order a 'scallop' in a fish and chip shop there you are in for a horrible surprise.)

So from now on I am happy to refer to the classic Rapley chip-sized baby portion as 'a finger' (as in 'a finger of fudge is just enough' - what do you mean you don't know what I'm talking about? It's an advertising classic, surely?)

That's an adult finger. However, a fist-sized portion will continue to refer to the infant fist, rather than the mitts of a hairy-arsed adult.

Has this helped? I fear not...