[Cwyn Eats] Infant Feeding

Before I start this next post let me just lay out my disclaimer: I am NO expert and while we stuck to the main ideas of BLW we did tweak and end up with our own version of what worked best for Cwyn. Here is a link to BLW so that you can read the how-tos from an expert. Again, this is just what worked best for us!

http://www.babyledweaning.com/some-tips-to-get-you-started

This is the BLW blog so you'll find other links/blog posts that can help guide you on there. 

So back to our journey. I started by just doing lunch with Cwyn. I had just started staying home full-time and lunch time gave us the most uninterrupted, happy baby time of the day to eat. She didn't need the food for nourishment so there were no set rules for what to eat. We just gave her a food or two here and there and let her try it out! Here is a list of the foods we started with:

Fruits

     Banana

     Pears

     Avocado

     Apple

     Peaches

     Melon

Veggies

     Sweet Potato

     Squash

     Carrots

     Green Beans

     Pumpkin

     Potato

     Broccoli

     Asparagus

     Cucumber

Others

     Meat

     Eggs

     Cheese

     Rice

     Pasta

     Fish

     Bread

The most important thing to do with BLW is to make sure all food is "mashable," as in, it can be easily mashed with babies gums. Also make sure baby can hold onto whatever they are eating, whether it needs to be kept big or made small. Core and peel fruits because the skins are hard for baby to eat and seeds are obviously not good for baby. Other than that, anything else is usually a go!

For us, BLW was very messy at first and somewhat discouraging. It seemed as though she would never get the hang of eating. She just squished it around on her tray and then faceplanted into the tray to suck it up with her mouth. Eventually, she got better and better until she was finally getting food into her mouth. The chewing and swallowing is a whole other aspect to BLW lol but rest assured that eventually that too will come, right along with all the heart attacks mom will have when baby makes the panicked gagging noise and face! The coolest part about BLW is that there aren't "baby foods" and "adult foods." As long as it is healthy with no or minimal sugar/salt in it, baby can have it. It was so nice and fun for me to just make my meals and share them with her versus feeding her puréed baby food and then trying to feed myself in between. It allowed us lots of time together to interact and chat. We officially started when she was about 7 months, though we had given her tastes of our food here and there before then. Here are some pictures of her from when we first started BLW...

Once we started BLW it was like a whole world opened up to Cwyn.. She loved eating and looked forward to meal times and it became my favorite time with her. Some of her favorites when we first started were sweet potato sticks, apples, eggs, bananas, avocados, noodles, chicken and cantaloupe. She has obviously progressed to eat anything and everything, so I'll touch on some of that in another post.

If you're interested in learning more about BLW feel free to ask me questions or just search the internet. There's a lot of great resources available for BLW.