As we approached Finn's 6 month birthday, I started putting a lot of thought into how to go about feeding him his first solid foods. I had read about Baby-led Weaning in my breast feeding book and it intrigued me from the very start. So, as is usually the case when I don't know what I'm doing, I ordered a couple of books on the subject of feeding baby; Wholesome Baby Foods (which is a book promoting purees) and Baby-led Weaning.
After reading both, I decided that I wanted to try Baby-led weaning, however, I was glad that I had purchased the other book as well, since the author of Baby-led Weaning didn't offer much in the way of what foods were appropriate for each age group and Wholesome Baby foods provided a lot more detailed instruction on that front.
Finn seemed to be very interested in watching us eat so I was confident that when we gave him his first foods, he would dive right in and be a great eater from the start. As usual, things did not go as I had hoped. Finn would barely touch the food at first and when he did bring some of it to his mouth, he would get the most disgusted look on his face. When he did manage to take a bite of something, there was usually a lot of choking and gagging, which was hard enough to watch, but what was worse was that there was once again blood in his diaper (even though I hadn't had coffee in months). So after some intestinal distress and an intense bout of crying that prompted me to call his doctor, we decided to put a hold on solid foods for a couple of weeks and give his little digestive system a chance to recover and mature a little more.
So after a couple weeks of just breast milk, some probiotic and water, we started again, except this time I tried doing purees and spoon feeding him. What a disaster! Not only was preparing purees tremendously time consuming, I couldn't get Finn to eat much more than a spoonful. After a couple of weeks it had gotten to the point where just putting him in the high chair caused him to purse his lips and turn his head away!
Then one night after failing to feed him, yet again, Ben came into the kitchen and started eating some of the green beans that were still left in the steamer after dinner. Finn was watching him intently and Ben asked if he could give him one. I saw no reason why not, so Ben gave Finn a green bean and to our surprise, he devoured it. We gave him another and another with the same result.
Well that settled it. I wasn't going to bust my buns any longer on purees that he wouldn't eat if I could just give him the same foods we were eating, so back to baby-led weaning we went and it has been amazing. I am constantly in awe of how well he handles his food and how much of it he actually eats. He seems to like just about everything we put in front of him. The only two exceptions seem to be rice and broccoli. For some reason he won't even touch those foods with his hands, much less bring them to his mouth for a taste.
I'm so glad we gave it another shot. It has been so much more fun for both of us and I'm so proud that he is such capable and confidant eater!
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