The baby's gone on Highchair Strike...

In our household we've always believed in the principle of sitting down to eat - preferably together. On the one hand it's safer; there's less risk of a little person choking if she's not wandering around the room while she eats. And on the other it's a teeny, tiny bit less messy if she's sat in one place! My least favourite meals have been the ones where Bean has been free to roam, tomato-stained fingers and all (especially as there's usually a cream sofa within grasping distance).

But in addition to this there's the social etiquette thing. A lot of our meals are family social occasions and it's soooo much nicer when she's there, part of it, and usually being the most entertaining thing at the table (because she's cute, not because we're boring, btw!!!! :-) ). It's just not the same if she keeps wandering off to play somewhere and you can almost hear the tuts at how ill-disciplined our child is if she doesn't sit nicely. After all, it's perfectly reasonable to expect a young toddler to have a two hour attention span as we all take our time on a leisurely lunch. NOT!

Up until a couple of weeks ago, however, Bean was always excellent at going into her chair, eating however much/little she wanted, and then asking for "up". Now is a different time.... Now, if she doesn't want to eat she WILL NOT go in the chair and sometimes, even if she does want to eat, she WILL NOT go in the chair (but will grab the food from the tray and run off to her Cosy Coupe and eat it in there!). We're talking screams of "noooooo", legs kicking all over the place, arched back, the works.

So we've tried the following:
1) Put her in anyway.
My least favourite solution as it involves holding her tightly and somehow manhandling her into place. She doesn't like it, I don't like feeling like I'm forcing her, and it rarely results in her eating. So after 2 or 3 attempts at this we abandoned this tack as too unpleasant and against our parenting beliefs.

2) Tell her no chair, no food.
And off she runs happily to play, confident that there's always copious streams of breastmilk should she feel hungry later on.....including at midnight, 2am, 3am, 430am........ I'm now too tired to continue with this option! :-/

3) Let her eat picnic style....
....as long as it's not anything runny! Generally this would only apply to tea time anyway, which she has generally remained ok about going into her highchair for. So increasingly her breakfast has been croissant-type things and fruit, while lunch has been slices of ham, chunks of cheese, breadsticks and more fruit. We're ok with this one, as long as she shows she can still "do" proper sitting down meals, which brings us to.....

4) Let her sit at the table on a proper seat
After all, this is the crux of it really. She may only be titchy, but she's decided she's all grown up! In the car, she wants to sit on a proper seat with a proper seat belt (obviously not possible!), and for mealtimes she wants to sit on a proper chair like Mummy and Daddy. Out and about this works fine. Lots of places have comfy bucket-style armchairs that she can safely sit on, but at home we have standard open-sided dining chairs. But we have found a few ways of making her Big Girl dreams come true...

Firstly, we got her a child's table and chair for the kitchen where she can eat her breakfast (for 5min before she gets up and finishes it off picnic style)

Secondly, we put one dining chair against the wall and sat her on it, and then put my chair right against the other side. She stayed there for about 7min :-)

And then finally we got our Amazing Travelling Highchair (see earlier posts) and put that on one of the seats. I was far from convinced it would work - after all it's still a highchair of sorts - but so far so good! No kicking and screaming sitting on it and no getting down to wander around all the time. She's not using the tray so she eats from the table like the rest of us and for now, that seems to be good enough for Bean.

Winner!

The Land of Milk and....................More Milk!

Today Bean turned 18months. :-)

That means she has been eating solid food for just over one WHOLE year.

And a few weeks ago (right before the horrendous week 75 development leap) I distinctly remember having a conversation with my own mother about how Bean seemed to have finally cut down on her breastmilk feeds. We'd even had a few days where she'd gone 7 or 8 hours with me physically in the room with her during that time!

When oh when will I learn to NEVER say things like this in Bean's hearing?!

When she was a newborn it happened if we praised how few night wakings we'd had recently - she immediately subjected us to a 7-feeds-a-night marathon. Then if we mentioned that the last few dirty nappies had somehow not escaped out of the nappy, the next one would be right-up-to-the-neck-and-requiring-a-bath jobbie. To this day, if I tell Bean she's eating really well, it's like she suddenly notices and decides she's all full up!

So I suppose I shouldn't be surprised that, after commenting on how little milk Bean had had recently, she's suddenly gone into Boobie-Overdrive and is asking (no, strike that, DEMANDING) for "MAAAAAAA" every time I enter the room/sit on the couch/try to do something else. We're easily back up to 8+ times a day and she's no longer sleeping through either, but waking once, sometimes twice, for milk then too. (FYI, she only slept through for a couple of weeks around turning 15months).

To begin with it impacted on her food intake. She always wanted milk right before a mealtime - just the way it panned out I think - so wasn't that hungry. And then would finish eating early in order to fit in another milk feed afterwards too. We had maybe a week of Milk Days and boy did it show in her nappies! ;-)

It's really disconcerting though. You imagine your baby will just progress forwards, gradually eating more and more until the milk part of her diet dwindles away to nothing. So when your 16month old eats well, but your 17month old eats nothing, you get (well, I get) a bit worried. Should I refuse to breastfeed? Should I give more snacks? WTF is going on?????

Fortunately for Bean, I spend so long wondering what to do I never actually get round to "doing" anything! :-) She has therefore had her milk whenever she's wanted it and had her food whenever she's felt like that too. And now, at 18months, she's eating two pretty good sized meals and one that's little more than a snack, plus her 8+ breastfeeds!

Oh, I've written this once she's in bed though. I don't *think* she can read yet but I'm not taking any chances on her finding out what I'm telling people now......

I can hear you Mummy.............

Fork it!

So we've mastered cutlery! At 16months old.

We'd had a few prior "cutlery-moments":

This one, at 6.5months, was a pre-loaded spoon that somehow (perhaps by accident) managed to make its way accurately into Bean's mouth. And then this one, at nearly 9months old, was some early success with dipping.

But it was a skill quickly forgotten as she got more interested in learning to crawl, walk and talk.

To be honest, it's not something I've pushed much - didn't even regularly give Bean cutlery til she was over a year old - but then she hadn't seemed fussed about it until the last two or three weeks. Since then it has been THE thing to do :-)

And just like when she was first learning to use her hands, Bean chose peas and sweetcorn as her food to practice on...... I mean, seriously!? Could she possibly have chosen anything more tricky to try and pick up with either a fork or a spoon?!? Even I, a fully grown adult (allegedly), frequently squish the peas when trying to spear them, or have to hold them with my other hand, or have them roll away at the slightest touch. Watching my little determined Bean try desperately to aim her prongs as this TEENY TINY pea has been heartbreaking (and a little amusing). And this week she finally let her frustrations show when, after attempting and failing to spear one several times, she finally went "arghhhhh", grabbed her fork with both hands and pushed it hard onto the pea, sending it skidding across her tray.

Made me giggle to be honest! So it became a game which she still does now, even when she's successfully spearing! :-)

So anyway, one meal Bean unsuccessfully aimed at a few peas and then decided to try a piece of cubed potato instead. Got it in one!

Cue lots of cheering, clapping, and a very happy Bean. In fact, every time we stopped clapping she'd cheer again and make us clap all over again. :-)

But it's a game that worked, because in just a few short days we've gone from little or no cutlery to almost entire meals eaten with a fork and/or spoon. Breakfast - fruit eaten by hand, cereal eaten by spoon and yoghurt eaten by spoon. Lunch - scrambled egg eaten by fork. Dinner - pasta with peas and sweetcorn, all eaten by fork or spoon.

Oh, and a pear for dessert. Also eaten by fork :-D

Back to Basics: Portion Sizes

The other day I learnt an interesting fact:

A baby's portion size should be no more than they can hold in their hand.

Oh

My

Goodness!!

No wonder Baby Bean doesn't eat half of what we give her! A serving of meat stir-fry, for example, should be as much rice as she could hold in a cupped hand, a piece of meat the size of her palm, and then a generous hand-sized serving of veg.

Now perhaps this is a fact I should have known; after all, it apparently is true for adults too (oops, I appear to overeat on a thrice-daily basis!!), but it's come as something of a revelation. Bean eats about 4-5 pieces of pasta, for example, which is apparently the correct portion size. I give her 8-10 pieces. One tablespoon of mashed potato she can probably manage - I give her about three, just in case she was in the mood for it and so ate loads! The outcome? She's completely over-faced by the amount of food in front of her, eats very little, starts chucking the excess onto the floor and the whole meal becomes a battle.

The fact of the matter is that I have forgotten the first, most important, rule of Baby Led Weaning - babies can self-regulate their intake.

Look, at 14 months old this was what I put in her bowl (not a healthy meal, but a desperate what-have-we-got-in-the-fridge meal)

And this was what was left:

Sensible girl ate probably the most healthy part of it too! :-)

In my defence, there are the occasional days when she will eat almost everything in the first bowl, but I HAVE to stop serving a portion that size just on the off-chance! So what do I do? I buy new crockery (any excuse). We now have these, Tesco Loves Baby segmented plates.





It's working really well - I put a serving of veg in each triangle and then the carbs/meat/dairy share the larger section. As long as I don't stuff the sections full, the amount of food seems manageable. And hey presto, Bean tucks in!

So it's back to the beginning for us. I'm re-reading my Baby Led Weaning principles and trying to get to grips with those we've let slide. Turns out Rule Number One isn't the only one, but that's another post...

What do you fancy for dinner, darling?

A commonly asked question in households up and down the country, and yet one that was never as tricky to answer as it is now!

Life pre-Bean, I must admit, was mainly fuelled by frozen meals and jarred pasta/Chinese/indian sauces. It wasn't that we couldn't cook; more that after a full day at work we just didn't have the inclination. All we wanted was something quick, easy, and which could cook itself while we relaxed with a cup of tea in front of something relevant like Come Dine With Me (!).

Now, however, there's salt and sugar content to think of, and proper nutrition. In other words, there's a reason to cook. So cook I do, despite the fact that each day I've probably done more work whilst at home than I ever did in my paid job!

 A family favourite from my childhood - chicken, mushroom & pineapple with rice.

Of course cooking in itself is only one part of the equation. There's the shopping that goes with it. Suddenly I need to understand how to cook different vegetables; I need herbs, spices and a host of other "ingredients" in the house, and I need to remember to use things within  a few days (we currently have some very soft, green-ish used-to-be-potatoes lurking in our vegetable hopper). And yet despite the culinary world that has now opened up to us, the answer to this age-old question of what to eat is still:

"Don't know really. We've not got much in."

It's rarely true; there's usually plenty in! But it's usually things to make pasta with as that is Bean's (and mine, to be honest) preferred meal. But Bean's Daddy insists that we need more variety than tomato & beef pasta one day and creamy chicken pasta the next. Shame really.

No, our big problem now is that Bean doesn't eat most of the things that make up our diet! She's not a fan of cereal (even the infamous Rice Krispies are being eschewed at present), nor bread; rice she struggles with, she eats very little meat and has to be in the mood for cheese. And this is what she does to sandwiches:

So...... Our meal options are generally as follows:

• Breakfast - fruit & yoghurt, scrambled egg and ham, onion or cinnamon & raisin bagel with cream cheese (1 small piece), and sometimes a few spoons of unsuitable sugared cereal.

 

• Lunch - wraps (nibbles a bit and then UNwraps), any of the above breakfast options or below dinner options, sometimes a sandwich (usually if we're out), plus snack things.

 

• Dinner - pasta, mild curry, peas, sweetcorn, broccoli, fish/fish fingers/fish cakes, chips, pizza-type things, salads, prawn crackers, garlic & naan breads. Then yoghurt, fruit, rice pudding etc for dessert.

Doesn't look too bad written down, but it's not even enough for a different option a day and, as she gets bored of having something all the time and so starts rejecting it, our options narrow. As of today, however, Bean discovered dipping (by stealing Mummy's ketchup :-0 ):

...so humus and crudities will be going on the to-be-tried list :-)

So your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to give me ideas! (Please!!!) Write them as comments below and between us we should get some great menus going.

IT'S A MIRACLE!!!

I think Baby Bean must have taken pity on me after my last few posts bewailing the mess. Because tonight something amazing happened...

THERE WAS NO MESS! :-)

And I don't mean she just dropped a little bit; or the splashes only reached her eyebrows instead of the hairline; or she only flung her spoon onto the table instead of the adjoining room.

No. I. Mean. There. Was. No. Mess.

Zero.

Zilch.

Nada.

16months old today and look!

This is at the end of the meal!! Don't believe me? She's eating an ice cream cone, so that would be dessert, yes? (Actually, it's Daddy's dessert, but she nicked it, so now it's Bean's dessert! I believe that's how it works with children?)

But look! See that shiny clean floor, and that shiny clean tray, and that shiny clean baby? Maybe you think dinnertime consisted of air? Nope - wedges, cauliflower, sweetcorn, pizza and yoghurt. She ate almost all and what she didn't want she calmly handed over to us.

It's unbelievable! I'd say I'm speechless, but I'm clearly not. Instead I am rambling. :-)

So, the moral of my amazing story? Have faith. One day your baby too will eat all their tea in a polite and clean way. It might only happen that one time (I'll let you know on that score) and it may come after eating next to nothing for breakfast and lunch (yep, she's a one-meal baby this week), but it WILL happen.

YAY!

Food hats

I'm not a great one for mess.

There, I've said it! It's something I didn't know about myself before we started baby led weaning. I thought I was quite relaxed about things getting mucky and was well aware that weaning of any kind would involve the smearing of food in places that it shouldn't be smeared.

But then my darling baby reached out a tomato pasta-covered hand to my bare arm (not even a white sleeve there to justify this) and I flinched!! I was really surprised! But it turns out I really don't like getting messy!

So, after 9months of weaning I'm pretty much ok with the bits that go to the floor, and I'm fine with sweeping out the highchair, and I've even come to terms with a yoghurt covered face, hands and arms (as long as they aren't mine, that is!). But, as if sensing that new levels of mess were required now, Bean has started decorating her hair. :-)

First we had this, carefully balanced pieces of food. I was actually quite impressed and, perhaps mistakenly, clapped and laughed. Because next we had this:

 

Yep, that is indeed tomato sauce matted into her lovely blonde hair! Fortunately she doesn't have much hair (can you imagine if she did?! Aaaaaaarrrrrgggghhhhhhhhh!).

 

So how on earth did this come to be, I hear you ask? Or perhaps this isn't that odd an occurrence in your house either! For us, it came about because my Other Half played hide-the-toy with her, and he hid it by putting it behind his head and dropping it down his t-shirt.

 

A very funny game, yes? And when cranberries and raisins drop out of her vest everytime we undress her it is pretty amusing. As it also is when Bean tries to fit a book down there. :-D But then she did this one mealtime and we realised things were about to get very messy:

 

 

Hmm, think I'll be playing the "I made the meal so OH can do the tidying up" card now!



The Throwing Phase, Take 2000!

Now this was one I thought we'd grown out of. Giving Baby Bean free reign with all sorts of potential-for-creating-havoc foods was always one of my least favourite parts of BLW, but after the first few months I thought we'd cracked Bean's desire to throw.

And then we clearly hadn't!

And then I thought we had.

But no, it would appear not......and so on!

So far we've had the following Throwing Phases:

1) The not-really-able-to-grasp-so-dropping-accidently phase
2) The moving-things-around-the-tray-and-pushing-some-off-in-the-process phase
3) The oops-I-dropped-it-but-I-want-to-eat-it phase
4) The oooo-what-happens-when-I-do-this-phase
5) The hold-it-over-the-edge-while-smiling-at-mummy-and-saying-no phase (one of my personal favourites as it was actually quite funny)
6) The sorting-it phase
7) The I-DON'T-WANT-IT phase
8) The I-DON'T-WANT-IT-oh-I-do-want-it-I-DON'T-WANT-IT-oh-I-do-want-it-I-DON'T-WANT-IT....... phase
9) The clearing-the-tray-by-swiping-it phase
10) The moving-it-out-the-way-to-eat-all-the-peas-first phase

But now we have the GRRRRRRR-why-can't-I-pick-it-up-with-this-fork tantrum phase, combined with a rather random careful-picking-up-one-item-in-each-hand-to-drop-them-over-the-side-of-the-highchair phase.

WTF??????

The first phase I can understand. Baby Bean is clearly frustrated, chasing peas and sweetcorn and pasta around her tray with a misbehaving fork. Her fine motor skills are so good when using her hands she just doesn't understand why she can't get the damn fork to make contact with the thing she's aiming it at!

But the other phase? The one that's just appeared these last few days? What's that all about? If I grab her hands she looks up at me, calm as anything, and goes right back to eating. Sometimes she'll look over the side and go "Oh no!!!!" But usually her picking and dropping gets faster and faster and the only recourse I have is to remove all the food faster than she can.

I do have some theories - it's a new way to announce she's full and/or bored, or maybe it's linked to frustration and she simply "dumps" it all when it doesn't do what she wants, or perhaps it's a return to sorting and trajectory experiments. But given that we'd made some major headway on Bean eating from a bowl or plate, rather than just a tray, and on eating well before simply handing the remainder to me and signing she was full, this feels like a bit of a step backwards. We're once again having to limit how much we give her at a time or it starts flying off into the curtains (usually with a pretty impressive backspin on it), and we're once again having to gently remind her that food doesn't live on the floor.

I wonder if there is ever really an end to the Throwing Phase? I tell myself that it's not like she'll be an adult who's incapable of eating a meal without some of it heading south. And then my pasta falls off my fork on its precarious path to my mouth and hits the floor with a splat.

Ah! Oh well!

Waste not want not

At the beginning of our BLW journey I was frequently tempted by the apparent ease and cleanliness of spoon-feeding puree. Not to mention keen to up the volume of food consumed. So from time to time I blended up the leftovers of one of our meals, portioned it into an ice cube tray and froze it. Then after a particularly bad food-day I might defrost a few ice cubes in the hope that Baby Bean would magically convert to a puree-lover and eat a huge meal.

NEVER happened!

There were the occasional one-offs where she'd decide she liked the taste of what was on the spoon and would eagerly eat enough to get me excited, before rejecting the rest (a.k.a most of it). But more often than not the puree ended up in the same bin that the finger food went in.

So, almost a year after we started weaning, I have a freezer drawer full of puree'd spag bol, chicken dinner, lasagne and other bits and bobs. What to do with it all?!

Ahaha - think of it not as puree, but as frozen sauce! And so that is how we went from this (defrosted spag bol ice cubes):

 

to this - tomato pasta with hidden meat & veg!

 

OK, so technically I've made a pasta dish with a sauce that also contains puree'd pasta (!), but it was really tasty and I was kinda proud of my inventiveness. :-)

 

And Baby Bean seemed to approve.....

 



The end of our food diary

So finally we reach the last day of our food diary and it's a pretty uneventful one to be honest!

Breakfast - 1 segment of onion bagel, 3 cherry tomatoes and 1 piece of satsuma
Lunch - a small piece of ham, 1 cube of cheese, several multigrain hearts, a few blueberries and some bits of cake
Dinner - 2 spoonfuls of rice, 2 chewed bits of beef and 3 prawn crackers

So, what have I learnt? That not every day can be a good food day, but that Baby Bean does eat. Therefore, when she doesn't eat, it must be because she's not hungry enough to.

Sounds kinda obvious doesn't it! :-)

And yet, in the moment, when faced with a baby who won't eat the food in front of them, it's INCREDIBLY hard to believe. Unbelievably hard in fact. It's been a little easier since doing this diary, but there are still plenty of times when I find myself cajoling for just "one more mouthful" as if my baby isn't sensible enough to know she's still hungry.

Come on, silly Mummy! If Bean wanted to eat she would still be doing this:

5 days down...

So we're nearly at the end of the week and I'm starting to feel a bit better about Baby Bean's food intake. I know everything is in tiny quantities, but she's getting a lot of variety and it actually looks like quite a bit of food when you see it written down. So day 5 started fairly well:

Breakfast - half a lemon and raisin pancake, some grapes and about 5 multigrain cereal shapes.
Mid morning snack - multigrain hearts
Lunch - Ooops! Bean had kind of a looooooong nap :-) And sleep is WAY too precious to disturb for anything, even the chance to get some food down her. Besides, my baby eats worst when she's tired so there really is no point waking her up for a meal!

So the afternoon was spent with breastmilk being much in demand (I'd forgotten how often babies feed when on a liquid diet!).

Dinner - back on track with two of the best recipes in the BLW cookbook: lemon and tarragon chicken with pasta (plus peas, sweetcorn and cherry tomatoes), and quarter of an apple cooked in butter and cinnamon.

If you haven't come across the BLW cookbook, this is it. It has become my bible! And it has some great information in the front about why BLW is so good, just in case you need to convince any family members or childcare providers. :-)

On the 4th day...

....the baby ate quite well!

Breakfast was a fairly impressive quarter of an onion bagel with cream cheese, a handful of grapes and 2oz of fruit smoothie.

Lunch wasn't likely to be big as it was another day where she ate in a childcare situation, so she was far too preoccupied to eat. However, she still managed a quarter of a ham sandwich and a large handful of blueberries.

And despite this mountain of food, Bean still managed 3 potato wedges, two tablespoons of peas, carrots and sweetcorn, a tiny bit of pizza and half a pear!

It was enough food to be something of a "wtf?" moment. Perhaps, at 13months, we'd turned a corner and Bean's intake of food and my expectations had finally reached a happy consensus? What a lovely thought!

So today's internal discussion didn't centre so much around "was she eating enough" as "was a fruit smoothie a suitable food"? On the one hand, it's generally recommended that pure fruit juices should be watered down for kids; but on the other, fruit purees are considered ideal. And as a smoothie is literally just blended fruit, what is the difference between that and a puree? I decided there was no difference, and ever since Bean figured out how to do this:

...smoothies have been a great way to get fruit and liquid into her! (And yes, I know that's pure orange juice, but she stole it from me so it's baby-led!)

It's been brilliant actually. We haven't had a single hard poo since Bean discovered straws because her fluid intake has shot through the roof. It meant we've had to invest in a load more straw beakers as we only had one (bought along with a thousand other types when trying to find something she'd drink from), but it's also made things simpler when out and about if we've forgotten a cup for her.

This is the large Nuby one we've got, which is great as it has a cover for the straw. But we also have the smaller versions as they're easier to handle, as well as Tesco own-label insulated ones.

Day Three in the Food Diary Household...

So, we've had a good day and a mixed day, so I was pleased when breakfast suggested that Day Three would be another good day. But before I reveal what Baby Bean ate, she and I have a little confession to make - Bean's favourite breakfast food is Rice Krispies.

:o

I was so determined to steer clear of added sugars, and I managed it for the first 6months. But since Bean turned 1 year old I seem to have relaxed my rule a little and so, when she pointed and reached for my bowl of cereal, I let her try them. And in my joy at seeing her actually really WANT to eat something, and eat a significant amount of it, I've found myself allowing her this as a regular thing. On the downside, it has allowed refined sugar into her diet. But on the plus-side, it's not very much added sugar (it's just there for crisping the rice); it's made her much more interested in breakfast, and it sticks well to a spoon when wet so she's come on in leaps with using cutlery.

So that's our guilty secret, and I'm sharing it just in case some of you also feel like you break the BLW "rules." Hopefully I'm not the only one!

So, back to the diary....

Breakfast - several spoons of Rice Krispies, 1 slice of malt loaf with butter, 1 mini gingerbread man

Lunch (and this is where the day started to go downhill) - 2 pieces of pasta in a tomato sauce

2 pieces!!!! That was it!!! And tomato pasta is Bean's all-time absolute favourite food! No idea what happened there but Bean made it clear that she wasn't interested in anything more; so that was that. Mid-afternoon she therefore had a snack of some multigrain hearts and another gingerbread man.

Dinner - 2 more pieces of pasta (!) and then 5 strawberries and cream.

Clearly my cooking wasn't on a par with Kelloggs' that day! But it was still a day to note in our BLW journey because it was the very first time I used a food processor! I have owned it for over 10years but have never chopped, grated or blended a single thing in it until this day. So to mark this momentous occasion, here is the photographic evidence:

I was making a meal from Jamie Oliver's 30min recipe book - Pregnant Jools' Pasta. It took longer than 30min!

Food Diary (cont)

So Day One had gone well - Baby Bean had eaten a noticeable amount of food and I was feeling positive.

Then Day Two dawned.....

Breakfast (at home) - some blueberries and grapes, a quarter cup of milky cereal..... then the shrieking began so we stopped and went to play.

Mid-morning, because breakfast had been small, she had a few multigrain hearts as a snack. Perhaps a mistake, as lunch was all of a nibble on a tuna sandwich! Oh, plus LOTS of breastmilk!!

Dinner (at home) - 2 strips of chicken, a couple of green beans, 2 heaped dessert spoons of rice and red thai coconut curry sauce, and a bit of banana.

So something of a Mixed Food Day, although we do have another factor at play at lunchtime - I have started the SureStart Family Nurturing course and so Bean goes to the centre's crèche for a couple of hours. That was where she "ate" her lunch and I think, on the weighing scales of "Eating" vs "Exploring", the latter may just have won out. :-)

Still, at least dinner went well! I don't have any photos from that day to share I'm afraid, but instead I will plug a product - Organix "Cook with" red and green thai paste pots. They are really quick and easy and are basically like stir in sauces that are suitable for babies! We make ours with creamed coconut and they are so yummy I intend to keep using them long after Bean has grown up. I may need to borrow a baby to keep shopping in that aisle though......

Check out the paste pots here, as well as the other ones they do
http://www.organix.com/node/236909

Food Diary, part 1

Well, it's been a busy few weeks! I've not been blogging for a bit while I thought about some changes to the blog and in that time quite a bit has happened! We've hit some development milestones, got 4 more teeth, had aversions to favourite foods, eaten well, eaten poorly, and generally given me enough blog topics to keep this thing going for months!

But the thing that has been occupying me most has been whether Baby Bean (that's one of the changes, I shall now be referring to my LO by her nickname) is moving forwards in weaning; does she really eat as little as it seems, or is it actually not that bad.

So, to put my mind at rest and to give me and anyone reading this some kind of benchmark, I started a food diary. I kept it for 6 days and shall publish one day at a time.

So.....

Day One (the day of the BBQ)

Breakfast (at home) - a few grapes & blueberries, half an adult yoghurt pot, half a slice of malt loaf, a few sucks on some sesame bagel pieces.

Lunch (in a restaurant) - a few multigrain 'hearts', 4 potato skins, several penne with Bolognese, 2 small squares of pizza, half a slice of cucumber and some grated carrot, quarter of a scoop of ice cream.

Dinner (the BBQ) - 1 boiled potato, 2 cherry tomatoes, some pieces of beef burger and sausage, quarter of a corn on the cob.

Day One shall henceforth be known as A Good Food Day! :-)

The first picnic

Just in case I didn't rave enough about our new portable highchair last time, I thought I'd better say again how fab it is!

Picnics (or picnic-style indoor eating, given the weather) has been a non-starter with Baby Bean. Within seconds she's seen something on the other side of the room that she wants to play with and is off, speed-crawling to her goal, leaving me chasing her with a wet wipe to get the cream cheese and tomato seeds off her hands before they are embedded in someone's cream carpet! I've tried the following:

1. Sitting her on my knee with a book in one hand to entertain her with, and small pieces of food in the other hand for her to graze from. But those pieces invariably get "sorted" from hand to knee to sofa, back to hand and then to floor. With some smearing into my clothes for good measure.
2. Spreading a wipe clean tablecloth across the majority of floor so she can wander a little, and put her food on that to be nibbled on. But she THROWS things, and they ALWAYS land on the one bit of floor that wasn't covered by the tablecloth. And she crawls through her food!
3. Lugging a full sized highchair from house to house, and thanking God for the fact we chose to buy a Mondeo (for its cavernous boot) as our family car. Not really convenient though and means Bean is 4 foot in the air while the rest of us are on the floor!
4. Feeding her myself - eg. putting small bits of food in her mouth while she's playing, or encouraging her to suck from a puree pouch. But then she's not really part of the meal, and I'm still chasing her around the room, and there's always one time when she absent-mindedly sucks on the pouch before realising she didn't actually want it, and so spits it back out over EVERYTHING!

But now we have the Amazing Travelling Highchair and all is well :-)

So this Bank Holiday weekend we got invited to a BBQ by our good friends and neighbours. It was our first BBQ since she came along and thanks to our new highchair (and the rather wonderful cooking skills of our friends), I wasn't even a little bit nervous. Not about the mess (we'd be outdoors), not about Bean wandering off into the vegetable patch or the pond or the BBQ (she'd be safely in her seat), and not about whether I needed to take food with us (see the aforementioned good cooking).

And I was right. It was a brilliant evening. And Bean ate loads, including her first BBQ'd sausage, burger and corn on the cob!

 

Have chair, will travel

Remember my mini-rant about the ubiquitous highchair-without-tray? Well after a few more unsuccessful run-ins with this item I decided to wage war and take my own chair everywhere! Obviously our current highchairs (Mothercare padded and folding one and the convertible wooden one that becomes a table and chairs) aren't exactly portable! I can't easily roam the city streets with one of those over my shoulder!

So I googled it!

There are a few options it would seem - Lindam have a portable chair and Chicco do one very similar. But I liked the Mothercare one. It's height adjustable so can be lowered as Baby Bean gets taller; the tray doesn't have to be on it once she's old enough to sit at the table, and it comes with its own bag for carrying it! But it cost more than our normal (discounted, admittedly) highchairs.

So I ebayed it! (Gotta love the internet :-))

And look what we found....

 

 

So we have won! We can now BLW our baby with ease wherever we want!

 

But it also means I need to make a confession - we are now the proud owner of FIVE highchair-type-things: the aforementioned 2, a Chicco one which clamps onto the table, this one, and a booster seat that doubles as a change bag.

 

Do you think this may be excessive?!?! Or can it count as a "stash" for the BLW family? Thing is, they are all going to be so useful!

 

1) The wooden highchair lives in the dining room and is used for dinner. When Baby Bean is older she can sit on the chair, at the table bit, and colour in (just as her cousins did before her).

2) The Mothercare padded one is in the kitchen so is used for breakfast and often for lunch. It saves me dragging through the other one and means I can do house "stuff" while she eats. Besides, it has a removable insert in the tray so is very cool :-)

3) This one - well we can take it everywhere so will no longer have to worry about whether restaurants have highchairs. We can also take it to other people's houses!

Plus, Bean can touch her toes in it, which is ALWAYS a good game:-D

 

 

 

4) The booster seat - as per number 3, but we won't need a separate change bag.

5) The Chicco clamp-on seat......... OK, we probably won't use this one. But we used one in Wagamama and it seemed like a good idea at the time!

So you see, one highchair really is never enough!

 

Now, how do I stop myself buying an Ikea Antilop........

Sack the chef!

On the whole, Baby Led Weaning has resulted in some good meals in our house. I've been cooking properly; we've had fewer ready meals or jarred sauces, and the fruit and veg content of our diets has shot up.

But this week we had an unmitigated disaster!
Saag Paneer, a supposedly mild curry from the Baby Led Weaning Cookbook.

I don't blame the cookbook by the way - we've had some fantastic meals from that. I think it's more likely to be because I substituted some spices for others as I didn't have everything and I didn't actually properly measure out quantities; but I still maintain that anything which looks like this is never going to be top of my favourite foods list:

Mmmmmm, yummy!!!
I haven't seen anything that green and runny since a newborn Bean had a tummy bug! (TMI? Sorry! :-))

To be fair, Baby Bean didn't bat an eyelid! While me and my other half eyed our plates with trepidation and a fast retreating appetite, she picked up handfuls of green slime and rice and started eating. Well, she picked up 3 handfuls, and then stopped. And looked disappointed. After all, normally green things are yummy in Bean's book - peas, green beans, broccoli and cucumber have been favourites from day 1. But this really, really wasn't!! It was grainy, bland (yet with a sort-of-spicy kick), and generally just a bit odd.

She picked at it a bit, looked around, asked for water, picked at it again. Then realised it wasn't going to get tasty and started throwing it on the floor! Couldn't blame her really - I would have done the same given half the chance! And it wasn't because she didn't want to eat because when I replaced it with plain rice she ate loads more, and demolished the blueberries in yoghurt that came afterwards.

So the moral of the story? Sometimes you might want to be Popeye and eat spinach because it's good for you. But if you think a meal might be a risky one, always have a back up ready, just in case you're right!

These times are sent to try us

The last few days feel like a bit of a set back.

On Sunday we had a brilliant food day with Sunday lunch at my Mum's (Baby Bean ate a bit of sausage, loads of veg and massive handfuls of buttery mash) and then a mild green Thai curry for tea. She ate really well then too and SLEPT ALL NIGHT! I know the two may not have been connected but they still added up to a Very Good Day. :-)

However, it would appear that Bean ate most of her week's food in one day, because since then she's just picked at her food.......and then thrown it.

This is Bean with tomato pasta - her all-time favourite. There are about 10 baby pasta shells on the tray. She's eaten maybe that many already. Usually she would eat a whole (baby) bowl of standard penne or fusilli, let alone mini shells. This week, none of what is on her tray here went into her mouth. The open mouth that you think is for her to put food into? That's actually the beginning of an almighty shriek!

Because this is how we've spent mealtimes over the last two days:
Put Bean into her chair and put her bib on.
Give Bean her food.
Bean picks it up quickly and eagerly and stuffs it into her mouth.
Bean chews.....stops.....SHRIEKS.......SHRIEKS again....eats a bit more.....SHRIEKS......throws stuff.....eats a bit.....SHRIEKS.....

You get the picture?

I'd think it was a get-me-down noise, but she keeps eating.
Maybe a my-teeth-hurt noise, but if I start singing/dancing/reading to her she's all smiles.
Maybe she's after attention, so I pay attention.
Maybe she thinks it's a game if I pay attention, so I applaud when she's quiet and studiously empty the dishwasher if she shrieks.

Ultimately it feels like mealtimes are becoming a battle so I clear it away and give her some fruit and yoghurt (which she eats happily, although in smaller quantities than normal) and then let her play while I tidy up.

So I'm not really sure what's going on at the moment! I'm thinking she's just not really that hungry at the moment and that, quite possibly, a couple of really good meals have quite genuinely given her enough calories for a few days (with some little top ups). But it's trying and confidence-shaking. And I have to admit to having spoon fed her dessert today (well half of it - the other half she licked off her fingers and tried to drink from the tub!!).

So my plan? Very small meals tomorrow. And when (if) the shrieking starts we will abandon ship and let her play. If she wants more food she'll let me know and if we achieve a happy mealtime we can count it as a successful plan.

Watch this space....

A trip down crockery lane

A few months ago we started giving Baby Bean her food in a bowl, suction-glued to her tray, and it seemed to work really well. She had all her food in front of her to choose from and she ate her way through whatever of it she wanted with minimal interference from us. It went so well we invested in loads of the bowls for the Tommee Tippee magic mat (having found the Tesco suction bowl failed to stick).

Bean aged 9months having devoured spaghetti bolognese

Then Baby Bean discovered said magic mat.......and thought it more interesting than the food!
At first it was quite funny - once all the food was gone we'd remove the bowl and she'd happily tug at the release flap. But soon she discovered the mat could be peeled off the tray and from that moment on meals were only in the bowl for a matter of minutes before either I tipped it out onto her tray and quickly removed everything, or she flung it out as the bowl AND mat got waved around!

So we abandoned crockery! Until recently.

Bean has just learnt to sort, so now I give her dried fruits and snacks in a tub and she gleefully sticks her hand in to pull them out. The art of doing that is perhaps even more important than the fact she goes on to eat the food! But at least when she gets bored of it and flings the tub the contents just bounce and roll (rather than splatter and stain)!

Main meals are still, generally, served in small amounts onto her tray (from her bowl :-) ). But now I give her the bowl once there's just a little bit left, and her little face lights up at the chance to hold the bowl and scoop things out. Yesterday I gave her her whole dessert (blueberries and yoghurt) in her bowl and the first thing she did was tip it up to let it all slither out onto her tray, just like I have normally done! Then she realised she got to keep the bowl and started putting it all back in.

She ate the lot. And we had one pleased-with-herself little girl.

 

BLW away from home

Letting my baby feed herself can be a challenge at home, even when surrounded with a good highchair, her favourite foods, clothes she can mess up and lots of water, cleaning cloths & antibac spray! But leave the sanctity of home ground and things can get very, very complicated...

We've just spent the weekend with the mother-in-law.

And we forgot the highchair.......

To be fair, my MIL did her best - she has a wooden highchair but it has no tray or straps, so she put it against the table with a scarf as a makeshift seatbelt, put a plastic apron on the table and got out her melamine tableware for Baby Bean. Who LOVED it - it was a proper Big Girl setting:

Unfortunately the novelty only lasted til halfway through dinner, when the fact that the plate could be lifted up and turned upside down became more fun. And then she discovered that there were effectively 3 tablecloths to be pulled off. And then all of a sudden there was food on every piece of (very old) furniture and all the trinkets that bedecked the kitchen.

And we had 12 of these meals to get through, each one lasting less and less time before Lucy decided to play with the crockery rather than eat what was in it.

So one day we decided to escape to the sanctuary of a family-friendly cafe/restaurant with a proper baby-friendly highchair. One where we could put her food within easy reach on a tray that couldn't be thrown around.

Could we find one? Nope! All of them had those wooden stacking ones without trays!!! Great for toddlers or spoon-fed babies. Rubbish beyond all rubbish-ness for a baby led weaned baby. And they look at you like you're a bit weird when you say that their highchair isn't any use for your baby. It certainly never occurred to me before we starting BLW that a highchair without a tray was such a useless thing. But they really are! When Bean first started weaning they weren't even safe for her - she wasn't high enough up to not hit her head on the edge of the table. But more than 50% of places use these chairs - someone needs to invent a travel tray that clips on. I've added it to my list of baby inventions already :-)

So, exhausted by our inability to find somewhere suitable to feed our baby, we gave up, bought an array of different foods - sandwiches, baby food (just in the hope she'd eat from a spoon), pasta, chips & peas - wiped a table down with an anti-bac wipe, pushed the annoyingly common highchair against the table, and let her make another mess.

She loved that too. :-)

 

Before

 



 

After!

 

 

 

Happy birthday! One year old

So it's been a little while since the last entry, and yet we don't actually seem to have come very far!! That in itself is probably one of the biggest challenges with BLW (for me, anyway).
All around us babies of the same age are dropping milk feeds and eating apparently vast quantities of food, while Baby Bean's breakfast this morning consisted of both boobs (guessing around 6-8oz) and 2 chewed slices of banana malt loaf.

Notice I say "chewed", not just 2 slices.

That would be because Bean still has this interesting/infuriating (delete as per my mood that day) habit of putting food in, chewing and making "mmmm this is yummy" noises, before pulling a face and pushing it back out again. Sometimes she puts it straight back in. Sometimes she puts an identical thing in. Sometimes she drops it over the edge. And sometimes she ejects the contents of her mouth because she's so eager to get the next handful in she doesn't have the time to swallow?!

To be fair, her first set of molars are making huge lumps in her gums so for the past 2 days she's been more about the milk than anything. Even her all-time favourite (tomato pasta) went more on the floor than in her mouth. But even the best of days see her consuming far more than the 500ml (18oz) of milk that is "recommended" for her age, and which apparently drops to 300ml as of yesterday. Because obviously the clock hitting midnight sparks a magic chain reaction within my baby's digestive system and brain development that goes "bing - less milk now please!"

To be honest, I don't mind. At 11 months her food intake doubled and she seems to have got the idea that food is food, as well as fun. The only people who seem to mind are EVERYONE ELSE! It's a bit of a pain in that she doesn't sleep as well as other babies who take less milk and more food (more because Bean's favourites are low-calorie fruits and veg) but I'm quite happy for her to move away from milk a few months later than traditionally weaned babies. But in the eyes of so many other people, this slower transition is just proof that BLW doesn't work.

They couldn't have it more wrong.

This slower transition proves the exact opposite - that Bean is moving onto solids at her own pace; at the pace her body is setting, and therefore at a pace that she is controlling.

So when I am the Mummy with the only baby who will eat coconut curry, Brussel sprouts and chooses grapes over chocolate, that is when I will smile smugly to myself and know I did the right thing.

Baby Bean, demonstrating how to hide food in her seat, the day before her first birthday:

 

PS. Rant over :-)