BLW

It's amazing how much has changed in the 5 years since Hadley was born. Not only regarding products available for kiddos, but how easily accessible products and information is. I mean sure Facebook existed then, but smart phones weren't as prominent, and there weren't near as many Mommybloggers. (or if there were I didn't read them). The biggest change of all is the "organic" movement. I say that in quotes because I take everything I read on the internet with a grain of salt. Regardless of your opinion, every author has some bit of bias, whether they're trying to or not.

So that being said, this time around we're giving BLW a spin. What is it you ask? Baby led weaning. Which you would think they could come up with a better name than that, but whatevs.

Disclaimer: Now to preface this, I'm not writing a term paper people. This is strictly my opinion, and I'm paraphrasing from my "research". If you want to know more, or just want to know if I'm full of it, feel free to google. Google is your friend.

Now where was I. Ah yes, what is baby led weaning? Essentially it means skipping all "baby" food. By that I mean no messing with rice cereal, no purees (homemade or store-bought), no spoon feeding, no airplanes. I pretty much signed up after that, but to make myself feel better I kept reading. The gist of it is that we're not doing babies any favors by spoon feeding them purees. By feeding them purees we're teaching them to swallow their food, not chew it. Now maybe it's just me, but that just makes sense. And I kind of felt like, what the heck why isn't everyone doing this? I felt kind of cheated by Gerber.

For the lazy folk that just never got around to making our own "organic" homemade purees, this is a much easier way to make sure they're not getting all the extra yucky stuff in store bought baby food/cereal. And have you seen all those photos going around social media of mold and other gross stuff in some store bought baby food/pouches? I mean I know that's probably pretty rare, but still. Gives me the heebie-jeebies.

So with BLW, you just feed your baby whatever it is you're eating (minus salt). And the baby is in charge of feeding him/herself. Most of their calories are coming from milk anyways, not purees or table food, or whichever route you choose.You just have to make sure that the pieces are big enough for them to grab, but small enough to chew on. Keeping in mind that this is all a learning process for the baby. Learning to chew, not swallow. So be prepared for a lot of it to be spit out and played with. That's part of the learning process.

So I thought to myself, no extra prep, and no stress over how much they're eating/when they're eating. What's.the.catch. No catch my friends. Supposedly this also produces less picky-eaters. I'll get back to you on that one in the long run, but for now Parker hasn't met a food she doesn't like. Hello, easy street!

Girlfriend totally has the elvis lip down.

Currently her menu consists of:

• carrots
• cucumbers
• broccoli (loves this one!)
• avacado
• peas
• green beans
• celery
• toast
• pasta
• peaches
• apples
• mangos
• bananas

And that's only in the past couple weeks. My main concern was choking, but again that's the whole point of BLW, is teaching them to chew so that they don't choke. Also babies have an amazing gag reflex. And even though you aren't spoon feeding them anymore obviously they still need supervision when eating. 

When I thought about the whole baby food process with my older two, I figured the whole reason for purees was because they don't have any teeth yet. But neither of my older two had teeth until they were around one, so they were eating table food by then anyways. So why not just start with it from the get go? And granted we've only been doing this for about a month, but I'm pretty pleased so far.

Anyone else tried it? Loved it? Hated it? I'd love to know!