Solid Food

Over these past few months I have been asked many questions about Isaac, motherhood, parenting, etc. None so often as "is he sleeping through the night?" (I might post on that later). And, more recently, "has he started solids." I can confidently say now that yes, he has started, but in an unconventional way.

I certainly didn't feel rushed to start him on solids, and I wanted to make sure that he was exclusively breastfed for the first 6 months. We decided to use an approach called "baby-led weaning". It is a new (meaning very old) concept that basically comes down to letting your baby self-feed and skipping any spoonable items like rice cereal and purees. In the beginning, mealtime is about experiencing food - smelling, touching, licking, tasting, and eventually eating. Later, meals will become nutritive. By doing this, we hope that this will help develop Isaac's motor skills, independence and excitement about solid food. I am interested to see how this process goes (and if we stick with it)!

We got started with banana.
First, we needed our willing participant.

Check!

Now, time for the good stuff.

He managed to get some into his mouth, but more often, he ended up mashing it all over his hands and then sucking it off of his thumb.

So far, he's also had peaches and mango, and as you can see, meals are very messy!