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...