Thursday, March 22, 2012

To BLW and back

It's funny how your ideas on things change about parenting- before you have a child, and then they continue to change as things go.

When I heard about BLW, it made sense, I studied the book, and decided to go along with it.
We started with purely fingerfood at 6 months
I'm not exactly sure, but I don't think she'd had anything but finger food at 12 months, where we discovered her love of mashed potato- so she had mash
And then closer to 18 months, we discovered pureed food is very handy when she'll hardly eat any solid food for weeks when teething.

Finger food- mash-puree

Sound really backwards to anyone else?

What I've discovered along the way:
* You can serve up broccoli for a year- but she still won't eat it. I'm starting to think fussy eating is inherent to some degree, rather than something that can be avoided by an eating/ feeding method. We eat our vegetables in front of her. We serve her vegetables. After that, mayby we just have to admit mayby she's just not fond of broccoli for now.

* Puree of itself is not evil. (shock, horror)

* Sometimes, for the parent at least, any (healthy-ish) food she eats is better than no food. Rachael seems to take teething harder than most children. And, to be perfectly honest, I'm finding it hard for breastmilk to be nearly the entire food source for an 18 month old who happens to be both teething and having a growth spurt at the same time, for weeks on end, all day and all night. A little help by puree is appreciated to give me a little break.

*Kids really love those sqeegy pouches. Crazy stuff; if it's in a pouch, it'll get sucked dry quickly. Even though the manufacturers state you've got to decant the food first, honesty, no-one does because this way it gets eaten. I see parents everyday giving them tothe kids like this. I'm pretty sure it's the reason why they're packaged like that in the first place, but they're just covering their backsides.

*BLW purists would be appalled.

 But you know what? I don't have a problem with the way we're doing things. Firstly, we've figured out by now Rachael is not your "average" child. She's not at all inclined to follow the baby books, or the "methods". I don't wish we'd gone back and done purees from the begining; I like that Rachael is not used to being force fed. She's confident and in control. Even when that independance can be inconvenient to us at times.

So we've been to BLW, and back again. We've learnt some stuff, softened ideals on some stuff. And that's just the way it goes.

2 comments:

  1. lol, funny how things change, hey? We started with mainly finger foods, and I'm happy with the way we did it... he certainly is confident with food. But we're using more and more mush. Similar reasons - when teething pain is bad, he doesn't like to chew, and I was over the crazy number of breastfeeds per day since he didn't seem to be getting enough in from the finger food.

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  2. Hope, I think you're awesome xo

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