Baby Led Solids chatter #6

[Phteven]

Welcome to the Baby Led Solids (BLS) Information and Discussion Thread. This is a place for sharing your experiences with BLS, and also to ask questions. Please feel free to share your food ideas, successes, and challenges with BLS.

What is BLS?
BLS is also known as Baby Led Weaning or Infant Led Weaning. It is way of introducing solids. Instead of starting with pureed foods, it involves starting with finger foods. Traditionally purees were introduced as a first food, as babies were starting solids at 3 months or so. Now the recommendation is to start solids at 6 months, and by this age babies are capable of feeding themselves finger foods.

Interestingly, many parents naturally follow the BLS method with second and subsequent children. Physiologically, it has been shown that choking is less likely when a child is feeding themselves at this age, rather than having a spoon of food put in their mouths.

Why use BLS?

The many benefits include:
Less mess
Easier and less time-consuming, as food doesn?t need to be pureed or spoon-fed
Children enjoy feeding themselves, and it is good for their development to do so
Exposure to a great variety of tastes and textures earlier
Children are eating adult foods sooner, so that the whole family can eat the same meal

Your previous thread can be found HERE

[peanutter]

woo hoo, new thread!!

DS ate a bit more today which is good

We're trying to get him to have lots of veggies at the moment, and not too much fruit, because he seems to get a super sweet tooth whenever we up the sweets ... others find this too?

[Lily Dust]

Yeah we did. DD is much more in favour of fruit then vegies most of the time. But she will go through phases of loving all vegies and then only eating peas but fruit seems to remain consistant, loves it anytime

[HotI]

Breastmilk is pretty sweet so it's not surprising that bubs like fruit (that are often sweet). My DD is loving oranges and mandarin atm.

DD has a few teeth coming through and a runny nose (maybe related) and is not eating that much this week.

She was excited this morning to have left over roast potato for dinner though!

[melbel]

how do you do the oranges..just quarter/eighth them style? or peel and segment them?.....tried them with connor and he is not a big fan....we call him our champagne baby at the moment cos flavour of the month is bananas......friggin riggin......if h won't eat anything else he'll always have a banana.....I swear we're gonna have to declare bankruptcy it's costing so much!!

[belfie]

good question re the oranges... we haven't tried 'em yet, but yeah, we're missing those bananas!

[peanutter]

It's just so convenient. Now that DS has started on milk and we're slowing down his formula, when we go out to eat we don't even need to pack food really, other than some cruskits in the car. Yesterday, we just bought him eggs on toast with tomato and a hash brown, and he was fine

messy, but fine!

[starangelk]

I've got to say, I love the showing off factor of BLS. LOL

[*TripleJ*]

me too star she ate vegies the other night at my mums and she was impressed

jazzy had tuna casserole tonite feeding herself as i type i hope giving her milk is ok does anyone know

[peanutter]

same here - we just cook whatever meal we're up to, and then we plonk a portion on DS's high chair tray, and let him go for it

have done since 6 months.

there was very limited success for a while, but now he hardly has any bottles (0-2 per day) and the rest of solid food. And he *loves* it!!

welcome, kazbah!!
welcome star!!

[peanutter]

we give DS segments, but I sometimes take the "skin" of the segment off one side, as he only recently got his teeth and can't always split the segment open.

Or we just do eighths, and leave the peel on. Because they're cut, the skin of the segments isn't an issue, as he can get to the flesh

Jman is loving peas and corn at the moment, but he's got a weird habit of picking up whatever, and then instead of using his pincer grip, he'll curl his fingers around, so the food is clutched or (with peas, corn, etc) goes onto the fleshy part of his hand, and he'll eat it off there ... is that odd?

[melbel]

nah connor does that too...spesh with banana...smooshes it into his palm makes a big deal of inspecting it all and the smooshes it into his mouth!!

[milly5]

our little miss seems to be only loving the carbs ATM - bread, porridge, potato, rusks, crackers/biscuits, though i am putting avo on the crackers and EBM and sometimes fruit in the porridge. She seems to be giving vegies a wide birth!

[starangelk]

We leave the skin on the oranges as well....

DD is enjoying throwing her food off the table at the moment, very annoying but also cute when she leans over the side to see where it went and then waves to it. I have to hide my giggles She's teething her 2 front teeth and they look scarily massive coming through but it really does seem to have halted her eating. DH made her some mash potato tonight and she ate this and some yoghurt but threw her baby corn on the floor and this morning only ate half of her toast.

Anyone else notice a drop of interest in food during teething? What foods can I give her BLS style that would be a bit better for her during this time? I actually ended up spoon feeding her a bit of potato and yoghurt tonight and she accepted it happily enough while at the same time grabbing the spoon off me occasionally and feeding herself. She kept handing it back to me though so I think she was just being lazy tonight,

[peanutter]

hi MT!! welcome back

hi, kelly!

we give DS basically anything unprocessed. breads, veggies, fruits (though we avoid the really sweet ones, in the hope that he won't get too sweet a tooth!), pasta, plain yoghurt, meat, cheese, etc. whatever!

but we definately found that there was more playing than eating for the first while. but we tryed to make sure that we didn't stress over it ... the puppies were pretty spoiled eating the left overs for the first couple of months

[belfie]

Hi Kelly - we're trying BLS too, and I've tried to stick with sharing our meals with DD as much as possible. I found that she loves some veggies more when they're roasted (especially carrot & zucchini is good too), and also loves toast, baby corn spears are great, watermelon, banana (ha!), pear, orange, broccoli, scrambled egg (cut into fingers) etc. I also give her baby mum mums. To start with I think I was very conscious of giving her "softer" stuff, and she did do some gags to start with. Now she doesn't gag at all & just chomps away on everything! And I'm getting much more confident with her food. She also loves yoghurt and from the first second it was offered, grabbed the loaded spoon from the bowl & shoved it in her mouth! I was gobsmacked! Now I just have two loaded spoons in the bowl for her and she does the rest herself. She also has been trying to load them herself, whcih I didn't expect to see her doing at 8mths old! I think when we give them the opportunity to show us, it's amazing what they can do. And might I mention.. thoroughly enjoyable!

TripleJ - my DS has allergies, so i've been watching very closely everything I give to my DD and also trying to introduce foods earlier as research is showing that it's more beneficial to do that, than to delay introduction. So my DD has had plenty of dairy within products whilst not actually drinking milk. I'd be quite ok giving her something with some milk in it (in fact I think I already have). So saying, she's also had a wide range of nuts and eggs too (my DS's allergens), so as you can see, I'm going with a very inclusive approach .

starangelelk - your comment re the showing off factor... aaah yes! I feel ya!

[Mrs P]

Starangelk I noticed DD was keen on cold things during teething, so things like strawberries, grapes and plums cold from the fridge. She's got her top 2 and bottom 2, looks so cute!

I find that we still don't always give DD the same things we eat, but we do always let her feed herself. She's not keen on eating sloppy things with her hands, so yoghurt I load the spoon for her. Not keen on mash. Also couldn't eat rice either as she couldn't pick it up. She loves brown bread with cream cheese or avo but I worry that it's too much if she has this every day. Though at the moment she has a cold and is off her milk so I'm just happy for her to eat something.

[starangelk]

Thanks Mrs P, that makes sense actually as she is loving orange and grapes straight from the fridge.......interesting.