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!