Adventures in Baby Led Weaning

After 6 glorious months of solely breastfeeding my little Brendan (who knew that breastfeeding was so easy?!! THE original fast food!), we have been introducing him to the world of solid foods. As an avid "foodie", what Brendan eats is REALLy important to me (and Kevin). We've been trying to buy locally grown, organic produce when we can and have adopted a vegetarian diet for him.
(I suspect that a lot of my entries will focus around Bren's food! )

After we slowly introduced Bren to the joys (or not as the case may be!) of baby rice, I found some info about a new "philosophy" of feeding babies. Baby led weaning is the idea that you can feed babies whole, solid foods without pureeing everything. It teaches them a lot about foods, flavours as well as hand-eye coordination, and how wonderfully bite-sized foods can be launched across the room!!!
Seriously though - I love it!
To begin with, it was a bit scary - is he going to choke? can his tummy digest this stuff? is he going to develop allergies? Ack!! After refering to a number of sites (really like www.babyledweaning.co.uk), we've adopted a bit of both worlds... We mostly start each meal with solids (like some toast and jam, some pieces of fruit, some cheese and crackers, roasted veg) followed by some fun things that Bren can eat with a spoon (yogurt, risotto, pasta shapes and tomatoe sauce, etc). Did I mention he's a little whiz with his cup - no sippy cups here, the real thing!
So much fun for all of us - Brendan gets to explore his food while eating, and we get the joys of watching his meal-time adventures! It also makes food prep a lot easier - he just eats a lot of what we're having!
One thing I have had difficulty finding are recipes that are a little simpler for us all to eat - not too spicy, flavours not too complex, etc. I'll keep searching... I'm bound to find more!

Not a natural blogger...

After Kevin "gave" the responsibility of the blog to me, I thought I would take on the challenge with gusto... (see previous posting in January making promises to post every week! ha!)
And I've realised, and can now admit it openly without shame - I'm not a natural blogger. I think I'm more the type of person to look to the person next to me and say "hey, guess what?!" rather than sitting down and typing out the details. But sadly, most of the people who I want to share the "guess what" moments with are not close enough to me to tell them things in person.
With Brendan now along for our adventures in the UK, I think I'm going to have to try harder to make the time to override my non-blogging tendencies. Watch this space! (I think!)