| photo courtesy of wifey :) |
With all three of our kids, we’ve let them introduce themselves to solids to in their own time. It was a little more hesitant with the boy as he was our first and we didn’t really know what we were doing. Additionally he didn’t have a big brother (or sister) to copy, so he spent quite a while on baby jars and pouches. Fifi spent less time on them than the boy did and Danger hardly any time at all.
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| Locally caught rock in Beer, Dorset. With chips |
I remember Danger eating a few jars at Butlins, which is incredibly baby friendly, in their restaurants at 8 months, but pretty much right after that he was waving sausages around and shoveling pasta down himself as fast as he could. Now, at 16 months, he’s started using cutlery a bit.
It does mean that straight after dinner he has to go in the bath because he’s often caked head to foot in pasta sauce/yogurt/ketchup but it’s a mark of how his manual dexterity has progressed that he’s getting it all over himself rather than the floor.
I think the other big benefit from baby led weaning has been an expansion in the kids pallet. They will try and eat pretty much anything, and all eat what we have for a family dinner rather than having “kids food”. This extends from casseroles, to curries, moussaka to lasagna and well beyond. The only issue we have is the amount they want to eat- we had to take the boy off of school dinners because they simply weren’t large enough. None of our kids are overweight but they do eat fairly large portions; probably to fuel the excessive amount of running about they do.
None of them are fans of the chicken nugget, which I take as a sign of success…