Baby Led Weaning: Our Experience

I can't remember where I first learned about "baby led weaning" but as soon as I did I wanted to try it.  Behind on your hippie crunchy mom blogs?  I'll fill you in.

From their website:  
Baby Led Weaning, quite simply, means letting your child feed themselves from the very start...  You just hand them the food in a suitably-sized piece and if they like it they eat it and if they don't they won't.  That's the essence of Baby Led Weaning.  No purees, no ice cube trays, no food processor, no potato masher, no baby rice, no weird fruit and veg combos... just you and your child, eating food that you enjoy with you and your family.

Sounded pretty good.  Here's how we started:

We held off on feeding our little one any solids until about 7 months.  A lot of parents start rice cereal at around 6 months, but we chose to skip it (got the pediatrician's OK) since she was getting all the nutrition she needed from breastmilk and was growing just fine.  We also wanted to wait until she had the pincer grasp down, which comes at closer to 8 months.  

In the beginning, we did spoon-feed a couple of soft foods (avocado, sweet potato, applesauce), but we never bought or made any "baby food."  Part of me didn't want to feed her anything processed and part of me was just lazy and didn't want to spend time pureeing stuff.  So this seemed like a happy medium - we just smushed stuff up and made sure that if it had chunks in it, that they were small and she would be able to gum them up.  Of note:  Many parents (including myself at first) mistakenly think that their baby needs teeth to eat solid food - but if you think about it, babies don't get a full mouth of teeth until almost 3.  They use their back gums to chew until those molars come in, and they get pretty good at it.  

Once she had the pincer grasp down, things got much easier.  We tried a few basic things like peas, Cheerios, and, her favorites, these banana pancakes.  Very quickly she moved on to eating what we were eating (spinach lasagna, turkey chili, curried chickpeas), cut down into very very very tiny pieces so she wouldn't choke.  Once she could feed herself, she learned to entertain herself for a solid 30 minutes at the table, which was heeeeeavenly.  We would toss a couple pieces of one kind of food on her tray, she would eat/pick at it for a couple minutes, then when she finished we would toss her the next food.  Kind of like feeding bread to a duck.  

Happy duck

And that's basically it.  Now she eats pretty much anything we put in front of her and hasn't had any problems with textures or spices (she loves her curries).  Granted, this is our first rodeo with baby-feeding, so we are far from experts.  And we don't have any family history of allergies or anything like that, so we could be a little more laid-back in our approach.  It also requires you to do a leeetle more cooking to make sure you are serving everyone healthy, balanced meals, which I realize is not everyone's absolute favorite activity.  But for us, being able to spend the dinner hour actually eating dinner is worth. it.

(Also:  My mom told me this most wonderful trick for getting them to eat yogurt, applesauce, etc. since they don't know how to use a spoon yet -> put it in an ice cream cone.  The thin crispy cake cup ones.  They will nom on that thing for a solid 20 minutes while you do You for a little bit, you know what I'm saying?)