Baby led weaning.

This post was originally written as a guest post for someone who has since deleted their blog, so I thought I’d retrieve it and republish :-)  it’s a little out of date, smallest is now nearly 2!

When I had my first child and was a working mother, she was at nursery 5 days a week for an afternoon, and they introduced her to home cooked food.

At home, she got jars.

In my defence, we tended not to cook for ourselves at the time either – dp commuted to a contracting job in Birmingham, and I had my hands full pretending to be a woman who had it all, perfect career, perfect child, perfect home.

(If you’d seen my home at the time, you’d know this was very far from the truth.)

Anyway, fast forward nearly 11 years. I’m on child number 3. The career is long gone (bit the dust with child 2) and we’re in a very different place. This baby is being raised a very different way.

When we sit down to a family meal, she sits down with us. From 6 months, given that she was sitting beautifully and thus showing signs of readiness for solids, we offered her whatever we were eating, in terms of veg to begin with. I’d mush it a bit with a fork, and offer her some on a spoon, and some on her tray for her to explore in her own time.

Broccoli was a big hit. Fruit, particularly, apples was popular too. Potato, mashed with a little cheese went down well, and of course, the stand by of fromage frais always worked. I don’t think I’ve ever met a baby who has disliked it.

If I was having a sandwich, she’d be offered a little bread. For times when we were out and about and I wasn’t sure if there would be good options, I carried things like raisins and other dried fruit – apple rings, dried mango. It gets easier as they get older and get better at chewing, but even without teeth babies manage really well. A good tip I was offered was to give banana with the skin still on – they can chomp on it until the banana comes out and there’s a lot less mess and waste.

Now, at a year old, smallest eats pretty much everything we eat. Obviously I still keep the additives and seasoning down, but there was a memorable night when I was eating curry, mixed some with plenty of rice and offered it to her, and she absolutely guzzled it down. Because I cook from scratch I can make sure there isn’t a high level of salt being offered – we season at the table rather than during cooking, and it really does make life easier. No need to serve a different meal to each member of the family – apart from me, given that I’m vegetarian and the rest of them aren’t!

Baby led weaning definitely gets the thumbs up from me. I wish I’d had the knowledge and the courage a decade ago when I had my first child. Life would have been an awful lot easier all round.