Hi Melissa and duckeggblue!
Melissa - carrots are a funny thing, they're the first food we're told to give. The Italian guidline book says (and this I find pretty hilarious) week 1 carrot puree, week 2 carrots with a little olive oil, week 3 carrots with a little olive oil and PARMESAN CHEESE
they tell you to bf up to 2 years, but having introduced solids you can drop a feed after 3 weeks. A friend following their advice is so proud that her baby's taken so well to solids and now only has 1 bf first thing in the morning
and no formula either
sorry, that's a sidetrack, but a scary one. Then again I suppose the vast majority of the Italian population are perfectly healthy.
duckeggblue. Choking - Norah has gagged a couple times, but the only thing she ever choked on so far (leading to projectile vomit all over me) was a puree as I was shovelling it in to her. It seems that if I leave her to be in control of how much and how fast things go in, she has it under control. As far as convincing your mum - surely what she doesn't know won#t hurt her? That's my approach. All or better said, most babies have some finger foods. Does your mother really need to know that yours only has finger foods?
taken from Gill Rapley's original article on BLW:
Won't he choke?
Many parents worry about babies choking. However, there is good reason to believe that babies are at less risk of choking if they are in control of what goes into their mouth than if they are spoon fed. This is because babies are not capable of intentionally moving food to the back of their throats until after they have learnt to chew. And they do not develop the ability to chew until after they have developed the ability to reach out and grab things. Thus, a very young baby cannot easily put himself at risk because he cannot get the food into his mouth in the first place. On the other hand, the action used to suck food off a spoon tends to take the food straight to the back of the mouth, causing the baby to gag. This means that spoon feeding has its own potential to lead to choking – and makes the giving of lumpy food with a spoon especially dangerous.
It appears that a babies general development keeps pace with the development of his ability to manage food in his mouth, and to digest it. A baby who is struggling to get food into his mouth is probably not quite ready to eat it. It is important to resist the temptation to 'help' the baby in these circumstances since his own developmental abilities are what ensure that the transition to solid feeding takes place at the right pace for him. This process is also what keeps him safe from choking on small pieces of food, since, if he is not yet able to pick up small objects using his finger and thumb, he will not be able to get, for example, a pea or a raisin into his mouth. Once he is able to do this, he will have developed the necessary oral skills to deal with it. Putting food into a babies mouth for him overrides this natural protection and increases the risk of choking.
Tipping a baby backwards or lying him down to feed him solid food is dangerous. A baby who is handling food should always be supported in an upright position. In this way, food which he is not yet able to swallow, or does not wish to swallow, will fall forward out of his mouth, not backwards into his throat.
Adopting a baby-led approach doesn't mean abandoning all the common sense rules of safety. While it is very unlikely that a young baby would succeed in picking up a peanut, for example, accidents can and will happen on rare occasions – however the baby is fed. Rules of safety which apply in other play situations should therefore be adhered to when eating is in progress.
Time of day to start? I'd go for around lunch time, about an hour after a milk feed.
What? Some steamed veggies or fruit would be a traditional route. We started with carrot sticks, then zucchini sticks, banana, ripe pear. There are lots of ideas here:
http://babywhispererforums.com/index.php?topic=95978.0 and
http://www.wholesomebabyfood.com/ has lots of great info that can be adapted to BLW.
At the beginning don't expect him to eat more than the equivalent of a tablespoon full or so. Infact, he may well not eat anything, you probably will only know when you see what comes out the other end
leave it up to him how much or little he eats. Just keep an eye on the amount of milk he drinks - it still nees to be the main source of nutrition up to a year.
