BLW or Baby Led Weaning

We have been doing BLW or Baby Led Weaning for the bast 10 days here in the Bell household. Basically BLW encompasses skipping purees and baby cereals altogether and instead only feeding your child finger foods. One of the advantages of BLW is that babies are able to play with their food and learn about the different textures and shapes. Another advantage is that it makes meal time a fun, learning experience rather than a stressful one. One last benefit from BLW (there are many others) is that it puts the child in charge of what, when and how much he or she eats. The thought is that helps reinforce to the child to trust his/her hunger cues and with the obesity epidemic that we have in this country I would say that is a great thing.

We gave Matthew his first taste of solids on the 17th and as you have seen from our previous post, avocado was not a big hit. (We still haven't tried avocado again as I needed to buy some more. I am thinking that today we might reintroduce it to him at lunch time as I bought an avocado last night). Matthew's next solid food was bananas. Originally I had planned on offering him another type of food but he saw me eating my banana and was very interested. In fact, he kept on trying to eat the peel. So Cass and I put him in his high chair and let him have a go with the bananas. They were a huge success. The last food that we have since tried was sweet potatoes. While Matthew enjoyed them more than the avocado, he was definitely more intrigued with my spoon and with his bowl than actually eating the sweet potatoes.

Here is a video of Matthew enjoying his bananas:



Here is Matthew inspecting his sweet potatoes:



And here he is enjoying my spoon: