why am I doing this?

Naomi, my gorgeous, adorable, feisty 7 month old daughter has decided that food off a spoon is not sufficient! She would much rather get her hands in the bowl and do it herself. In this way she is completely different to her older brother at the same age. So I find myself wandering through the mire that is Baby Led Weaning (BLW). These are just some thoughts on what and how we are doing. She doesn't have any teeth yet which can make certain things tricky. And although BLW says control in the mouth is connected to the ability to adequately pick something up, this doesn't always seem to be true for Naomi. But then she did start off as a puree fed baby and we do still use a spoon alongside the finger food feeding. I wonder if this makes a difference or not?

Today Naomi has had some interesting flavours. Dairylea triangles and goat's cheese for lunch with small tomatoes cut into sixths, alongside her cubes of bread. I find it hard to come up with ideas for lunch as we have sandwiches and can be very samey but I want to give her as varied a diet as possible. BLW's I know give a lot of baked root vegetables but I need to be more organised for that! For tea on Sunday she did really enjoy the cold leftover veg from the roast dinner we had at lunch so I shall try cooking extra for the fridge and see how that goes. We do 99% of our meals from scratch so it will just take a bit more effort.

Pudding was some clementine segments that I thought she might have trouble with because of the skin but, no. The apricot was a bit neglected even though it was her favourite last week. I cut them in half today for the first time, as everyone else seems to, but I think she gets more enjoyment out of them whole. She likes to chew them, show them off, chew them a bit more, show them off again and then squirrel them in the roof of her mouth for later.

For dinner we all had left over roast chicken that I minced and added to mashed potato to make sausage type thingies. I then egged, crumbed and fried them. She wolfed them to my great delight along with her staple vegetable of broccoli. She just adores munching 'trees'. The mixed berries & natural yogurt for pudding might have been a bit tart but it still went down fine.

At least in the mornings she is really hungry and so will eat porridge or weetabix with added fruit off a spoon. I DON'T do mornings!