Never one to do things by the book, Babybear appears to be cutting every single tooth in her lower jaw all at the same time. It's rubbishissimo, I've got to tell you. The poor child wakes up screaming in the middle of the night.

Anyway, just another of the downsides of her teething behaviour is that if I screw up mealtimes and am still trying to get dinner on the table at the time when she should be in bed, her tooth pain really starts getting to her. She's hungry, but it's too sore...

So tonight as she painfully tried to eat her cauliflower cheese with courgette and tomato (one of my mum's 70s standby meals) I realised that I had frozen some of the Carbonara-type stuff that we'd had a few weeks ago. Twenty seconds in the microwave took the edge off the cold and I was able to peel off some of the strips of pappardelle (you know, the thick ribbony ones) and hand them over. She went from refusing to eat to demolishing the entire contents of the tupperware tub.

The moral of this story? Be a better, more organised parent and sort out tea earlier, but if you've blown it then some semi-freddo pasta might just do the trick.

Babybear has, as you may know, been using a spoon with some success for a while now. Not for everything, goodness knows, just for yoghurts and soups on days when I'm Feeling Strong.

Anyway, when I've loaded up the spoon she has until recently grabbed the spoon off me and proceeded to eat it/wipe it in her hair/flick it onto the walls. Not so the past week, however... at least not at first...

No, what Babybear has now decided she likes is for Mummy to load the spoon and hold it out, so that she can lean forward and eat off it. Like I'm a blimmin' wine waiter with the first sip of a freshly-uncorked bottle... 'Eez thees to your liking, Mademoiselle?'

If she likes it, then the paw goes out for the spoon, but if not her mouth will forever remain shut to the offending item (most recently a particularly delicious parsnip, lemon and ginger soup). And more than that, at just-turned one year old I appear to have been tricked into spoon feeding her for the first time in our lives.

No seriously... what happens now?

Poor Babybear is cutting about three teeth at the moment so she's just not that ravenous for food... Celery she remains obsessed by, which renders me more convinced than ever of its reputed numbing  properties.  And pasta fusilli with pesto and peas, she would happily eat that every day. Likewise oatcakes, cheese, broccoli, ham (loves it now, but only Nigella's in Coke, for god's sake), moon biscuits, raisins... och most things I suppose.

I don't know what I thought would happen when she turned one, I mean I knew that no-one would wave a magic wand and she would drop milk feeds but she still seems to be drinking a good four bottles every day and I'm disinclined to do any 'cutting back' as that just seems wrong somehow and against the spirit of Baby led Weaning? And I think they are still supposed to be drinking milk anyway... must find out how much.

And what milk? We're still giving her formula, mostly for my own convenience I must admit as we're not brilliant at remembering to buy milk in this house and also those Tommee Tippee powder holders are SO handy when we're out, but I suppose I'll have to start her on cow's milk soon...

I don't know why I'm moaning, really, she ate half of my Ginger Chicken and a truckload of edamame at our celebratory 'Well, That's the Christmas Holidays over for Another Year and Aren't the Sales Shite' dinner at Wagamama in town today, it's just that I'm wondering  where we go from here... I've liked not giving a stuff about what she ate so long as she is happy. Now what do I think? Do I have to start giving her vitamin drops? Do I have to start worrying that she is getting a balanced diet? Do I have to Start Caring?!

Oh My God - I'm going to have to start being a Proper Mum, aren't I?

...the other one was taking a bit long to load, don'tcha think? So from here on in, if you can, post your new random thoughts as comments on the bottom of this thingie, which will take the strain off the sweetcorn post. Now that makes perfect sense, doesn't it?


Oh, and remember that you can change the title of your posts, so that it doesn't just go Re:We need another... etc and then people will know what your question/comment is about.

A poster called Chilledy has just asked how long it takes to feed the babies in the BLW stylee, which rather got me thinking. I'm pretty sure that I remember my mother complaining in the early days that it was dragging on, and that if I would just shovel some food into Babybear's mouth then it wouldn't take so damned long. Yeah, thanks Mum.

I reckon that it usually took about half an hour before she signalled that a meal was finished in the traditional manner, ie by casually dropping any remainders off the highchair tray, tipping up her cup and splashing her hands in the water and making a soup out of whatever crapola is left there. I now look out for the first signal and remove her immediately. If she was enjoying herself and if I wasn't in a hurry then I'd leave her in for longer if she wanted to fanny around. Remember, it's for fun more than satisfying any major nutritional craving.

One big change that has taken place with increasing age, however, is that Babybear has discovered how to extricate herself Houdini-style from her and every other highchair we've encountered. Even a five-point harness is no match for her super-collapsible little body. It's very annoying, not to mention terrifying, to turn your back for fifteen seconds and  find her surfing on the tray.

If she spends as much as ten minutes eating by herself nowadays we are in luck, but if we're all having our meal together then she sticks it out for maybe twenty or so minutes. Her appetite also ranges wildly... she loves a big breakfast and a snacky lunch and when it comes to dinner either wolfs down an incredible amount or nothing at all. It's utterly dependent on her teething, the poor wee soul.

I've been meaning to say this for ages but have been rather too busy to update. I just wanted you to and the rest of the interworldwideweb to know that my daughter's nappies are now more solid, like human poo, rather than a motley collection of semi-digested and completely identifiable bits and bobs of undead zombie foodstuffs. 'The Peas That Would Not Die, The Raisins That Came Back To Life (As Grapes) ' etcetera etcetera.
It's been a good few weeks now since I've spotted a borlotti bean corpse, since she wasbout eleven months old, I reckon. Just thought I'd let you in on our latest proud parenting news... <Aitch preens uselessly>

Shee-yit. What now?

I do it quite often, actually. Since becoming a parent myself I've found that my tolerance for cooing over other people's babies has risen considerably. (And it's a good way of keeping Babybear occupied - she finds babies fascinating and appears entirely unaware that she is one herself.)

Anyway, one thought just struck me but I'm unsure how to express it without causing offence. Here goes.

None of them exactly look like they're starving, do they?

I mean, it's the biggest worry about doing this BLW thing, isn't it? That they aren't going to get enough, that somehow we are depriving them if we don't spoon the food into their mouths. And yet one look at the photos on this blog confirm that simply isn't the case. It has made me giggle a bit, actually.


For the record, anyone who wants to put a photo up is welcome to send them to my email (press my name and you'll find it) and I'll stick them on for you with pleasure. More strange creatures for Babybear to stare at...



(Weird, I've also just noticed that some of our photos of the early months have dropped off... wonder if the folder has become too big? Will investigate further.)

I've been meaning to tell you this for ages, but Babybear has started saying 'yum-yum-yum' while eating. That's how she says it so that's how I'm spelling it. Occasionally she does veer towards 'nyum-nyum' if I'm honest.

I'm not a big one for the whole 'my baby does cute things' school of blogging, but in this case I'm prepared to make an exception as it is simply THE SWEETEST thing on the planet.

So here goes... get it out of your system. What Cute Things is your baby doing? (Weaning-related, if possible, or we'll be here forever.)

Boomer has recently had a bit of a snuffle and bizarrely this has seemed to see an increase in her appetite. This seems to be contrary to everyone else’s experiences when their LO is under the weather.

 

Now it may be that I don’t think she was ever really that unwell, or it may have just coincided with a natural increase in her self weaning process. I think that latter is probably more likely. So for all you out there concerned about when their appetite will really kick in , Boomer is now 10 ½ mths and it has only just happened.

 

Boomer is still breastfed so I have no real way of checking her milk intake, but she still has about 4-5 feeds a day. I have however left her a couple of days from morning to night with someone else and she has just had food and water, no milk.

I'd say it's about half as much as she was doing a month ago. That tummy bug really seemed to knock her for six, first of all, and after a burst of eating to make up what she'd lost, her appetite seems to have settled back down.
I'm assuming that it's to do with the fact that she seems to be cutting some new teeth, although I do wish they would hurry up as she's pretty miserable about it. Which makes me and her father rather miserable as well, because it is knocking her sleep out. The teeth, I mean, not the food - she's drinking plenty of milk.
Anyway, I'm not overly worried as she is still eating well, just not as well as she has previously done, the poor poppet.

So I'd have thought that after a week of nappies o'erspilling with yellow goo (and goo makes it sound so much cuter than it was in real life), Babybear's appetite would slowly build itself back up to normal.

Wrong. This morning, for her first breakfast since showing any signs of recovery Babybear consumed three small baked potatoes (the poor child often finds herself eating leftovers from the night before), some sultanas, two porridge pancakes, a banana, a piece of broccoli and (as I frantically rooted about in the fridge for something, anything that was left) some chicken.  Yikes.  She didn't want a lot for lunch, needless to say.

The poor wee thing, gastroenteritis. It's been very grim, to be honest... although Babybear's been relatively chipper in between mammoth bouts of diaorrhea and vomiting, which is a good sign. I have been far from chipper, however - I've been the one miserably scrubbing and cleaning doing copious laundry and disinfecting, all to no avail. It started a week ago yesterday and according to the doctors might continue for a while longer as even if she's over the virus her gut is now completely traumatised and will take a few days extra to start absorbing things properly again.

The funny thing is that she seems more reluctant to take her formula milk than she is the very bland food we've been offering her, which isn't the way I thought things would go. Perhaps breastmilk would have been more appealing under the circumstances? (Mea culpa, mea maxima culpa ad infinitum). I have sometimes been giving her half measures of powder to liquid to lessen the strength of the milk but keep her liquids up, as clearly that's the most important thing.

You'll all be surprised to hear that I haven't gone short of unwanted parenting advice, though, so that's been fun to deal with on top of everything else. If one more sodding person gravely tells me that 'you have to make sure she doesn't get dehydrated' while offering me no practical insight into how the hell I get more liquid into an unco-operative child without resorting to a canula and an IV bag (my paramedic brother's helpful suggestion) I will fling thirty newly yellow-stained babygros into their faces and dance off into the moonlight.

Babybear has dined on chicken risotto, plain pasta, roast chicken, peas, green beans, bread and butter and pears for the most part this week as I have been trying to keep things as bland as possible (better for the baby, yes, but also infinitely preferable when there's a good chance you'll be washing it out of your ponytail at two o'clock in the morning). I have been very surprised at how much she has eaten. Nothing like her usual intake, naturally, but about half as much, which I wouldn't have anticipated.

So do you want to hear my top tip, courtesy of my mum? Immediately I told the old dear about the vomming etc she said to get an old towel or two over the cot sheet, so that when (inevitably) they puke in the middle of the night you don't have to fanny around with changing the bedding. It works... you just take off the towel, checking for damp patches on the next layer down, and then quickly hose the contents off in the bath. Once the baby is sorted she can go back into bed immediately (after a wee drink of water and brief toothbrushing session) and so can you, knowing that at least you won't have to face the horror of dried-in sick first thing the next morning. That's when she doesn't refuse point blank to go back into her cot, of course, because she'd rather jump about on your head for the next two hours...

Because it occurs to me that we are not, and nor have we been for some time. I'm wondering if it's been since she got some teeth?

Keeping the carrots chip-sized definitely important when you are starting off, that's for sure, as it seems to be as important that the food can easily drop out of their mouths as get in there so a long, thin piece is essential. But as Babybear has got older and more active, I think her need for texture has increased to the point where she would now be most frustrated with a puny finger of food.

She likes full-sized tortillas, quartered sandwiches, big hunks of meat, individual Yorkshire puddings and whole new potatoes, bananas, apples and pears. She derives a great deal of pleasure from closely inspecting everything that is about to go into her mouth (well, on a polite day - to be fair she fairly often inhales things without giving them a second glance) and a standard-issue chip of veggie would not satisfy. She turns things around in her hands, bashes them on the table, rubs them in the puddles of water that inevitably cover her highchair before either eating them, dropping them off the side or popping them into her Tommee Tippee bib for later. It's a rich and rewarding sensory experience for a 10-month-old baby, and a monumental pain in the arse for the person who has to clean it up.

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...

This is kind of an addendum to Sometimes They Really Eat Nothing, but I just wanted to ask about how other babies have behaved during growth spurts? Babybear must have been going through one over the last few days, as it appears that her appetite for milk has doubled. Honestly, the amount of Boots loyalty card points I am building up with this child...

It's amazing. She's nine months, as you may know, and she's always been a really good wee eater. Now she is much, much less interested in food than in milk. Perfectly happy to nibble on some broccoli rather than wolfing down a forest of trees (well, three), and eating a few bits of potato here and there, and bits and bobs of bread. Nothing in comparison to her usual range and amount of food.

Meanwhile, we have started doing a dream feed (first time ever - when she was younger she saw a dream feed as an invitation to play for the next three hours) at about 10.30pm. Even with that she might wake as early as 5am, the little rotter. I'm not really fussed, just fascinated to know if anyone else's baby has been the same, as I don't suppose I would have noticed it so much with her 6 month spurt as that was when we started weaning her.

Any thoughts?

Their administrators have deleted most of my posts (I was posting as MissPollyHadADolly) because this daft wee blog so threatens their enormous enterprise...

Apparently you're not allowed to mention other web addresses in case mothers use their brains and decide to visit more than one website... ze information about ze Baby Led Veaning is not for sharing, ja?

They've warned me if I mention this site again they'll revoke my membership and posting 'privileges'. It's obviously a very supportive environment.

Oddly, they've failed to spot one of the posts, but it can only be a matter of time before it is removed too. What a bunch of arseholes. Anyway, be warned I-Villagers,  it's a local site for local people. No  'incomers'  allowed.

S'true. Or at least it is for Babybear. She might wake up in the morning and turn her nose up at her bottle, drinking a scant ounce or so and then hardly have any breakfast either. It's quite freaky when it happens. But from what I've seen she never goes a full day without eating and drinking well, so I'm not worried about it. So does this happen to everyone, then?

I just wanted to check... is it just Babybear who, upon eating something, anything, for the first time pulls a face like I've just handed her an arsenic sandwich and actually shivers with revulsion? I'm tempted to give her something really revolting to see if she can crank it up a gear to express genuine horror. That would be very wrong, though, wouldn't it?

And here's what I've found... they all do Baby Led Weaning. In fact it was my own mother, who as you should already have gathered is right about everything, who said 'Oh for God's sake Aitch, stop reinventing the wheel, after the second child they're all baby led weaned.' Or words to that effect. She's really very supportive of me, you know. (I, by the way, am the eldest of four, weaned by the midwives onto baby rice at two weeks. It's a wonder I'm not typing this from my dialysis bed.)

So I have been asking parents of more than a couple of children that I have come across if they can tell me how weaning went for them. Without exception they tell me that they faithfully mixed purees for No. 1, slid a bit for No. 2 but No. 3 got loads more finger food. Partly because they were too busy for the one-on-one that spoon feeding requires and partly because by the third child they had established a routine whereby they were cooking actual real proper food every night that was suitable for children (no salt etc) and that while the mother is distracted by some dreadful menial domestic chore the baby is inevitably provided with some technically ‘unsuitable’ ie non pureed food by their siblings and just gets started.

And the mother, because she trusts her instincts and because she hasn’t yet broken the first two kids, lets them get on with it. Now, I'm hardly tripping over people with three children or more in the street, they are increasingly hard to find... which makes me wonder if the fact that most of us have fewer children nowadays at a later age has separated us from the ‘natural’ way of doing things? Well, until now, of course...

I keep on seeing people on other websites saying that their Health Visitors are advising mothers that their babies 'should' be on three meals a day by a certain age. (I'm not even going to print the age because the whole concept is bogus, so those of you who have stumbled on this page in a desperate search for hard facts which prove you are inadequate parents who are starving your children will be forced to look elsewhere.)

Now, I should stress that I am not accusing my own Health Visitor here because she has studiously avoided me since I quizzed her relentlessly when she came to give me her weaning talk... 'baby rice for the first week, apple puree for the second, carrot puree the third and then you're on your own'... and told her I was going to do Baby Led Weaning, which of course she'd never heard of. Having nervously suggested that the baby might choke to death she left the building and has never been seen again.

(Funnily enough, Morv goes to the same surgery as I do and the whole reason she weaned Boomer a little bit earlier was because of the panicky Health Visitors claiming to have seen her take a dip on the centile charts. I wouldn't know about Babybird because since all the problems I had with breastfeeding in the beginning - which one day I will work up sufficient bile to tell you all about - I have kept her away from the weighing scales and been much the happier for it.)

Anyway, I just can't understand how these other Health Visitors can be so definitive about what babies 'should' be eating. Think about it, with every other area of child development they give you months of leeway either side and solemnly tell you NOT to compare your child with other babies, but with weaning it's so prescriptive. Can you imagine if they indicated that you weren't doing a good job as a mother if your baby wasn't walking by a year? It drives me crackers because it stresses mothers out and that stress absolutely transmits to the child, leading to food anxieties all round...

So it seems to me that if your child is happy, healthy and enjoying playing with food, then you are doing just fine. Don't cut back on milk feeds, as I have heard some (idiot) Health Visitors advise, high-calorie milk is their main source of nutrients for the first year, and just leave the food for fun. As for three meals a day, bollocks. Only in the wealthy West do we finish our breakfasts while we wonder what we're having for lunch. Babybear sometimes has one, two or three solid feeds (sometimes with snacks if she wants them) because, and pardon me if I appear to be going over old ground here... we are doing Baby Led Weaning, not Health Visitor Led Weaning.

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...