baby led weaning update

Olive doesn't want to be be spoon fed by us, she clamps her mouth shut and turns away. We can even put food on a spoon and she will put it in her mouth, pretty successfully I may say. She has an independent streak a mile wide this one. So I have been reading a bit about baby led weaning (pretty sue I am repeating myself, ah well). Baby led weaning seems to be about the baby being in control of what goes in their mouth, the name gives some of that away, no? The goal is for them to get used to different tastes and textures while their nutrition is still coming from breast milk or formula.

Olive loves to munch on:

• Broccoli, steamed or stir fried but really soft so the floret kind of disintegates in her mouth
• Chick peas. Yep whole. I'm not freaked about the choking thing it seems. Olive has never gagged on these, I squish them slightly so they are slightly easier to grip and slightly easier to munch.
• Peach.
• Pasta, in particular, fettuccine, So little was eaten but the tomato and vege sauce went down a treat!
• Oven fries (I added some paprika to keep them tasty). She eats the potato and spits out the skin, or you could cut off the skin once cooked.
• Carrots and lamb removed from a slow cooker meal. She chews on a big piece of meat then discards it once it is grey.
• Peas, I serve them frozen, Ada loved them like this too, those little fingers working out what they can grasp. Olive only manages to consume about four in a sitting so I am not worried about her digesting the uncooked fibre.

One idea I read about that I haven't tried yet is to peel and chop into spears apples, pears, kumara, potato, carrots and bake at about 200ºC until soft inside, maybe 30 minutes, sprinkling each with something complementary. Cinnamon on the fruit, cumin on the carrots, paprika, mild curry powder even on the root vegetables. Olive being fussier than Ada has meant discovering that interesting flavours will entice her to eat more!

I do keep trying with different foods though and strangely enough as I go to post this we have discovered something Olive does want to be spoon fed. So, swings and roundabouts folks, that's the name of the baby game huh, all that change keeps us on our toes! So I'll post a recipe for that too...

 We miss watermelon...