Milo will be 10 months old in less than a week, my how old that seems, so I thought I'd give you a quick update on how we've been getting on with baby led weaning.

The short answer is amazingly!! I can't actually imagine feeding him in any other way-he has been completely in charge from the beginning and has such a wonderful appetite, he is certainly not fussy and besides, I simply do not have time to be making purées!

We took him out for his first, eating in a, restaurant experience last weekend. We were able to go to our favourite and have a lovely long enjoyable lunch, whilst Milo sat in his high chair thoroughly entertained by the plate of very colourful vegetables the staff kindly provided for us. He ate some meat from our own plates along with mash potato and a little ice cream! It was such a lovely way to spend an afternoon and hopefully something we will do regularly now.

I never really doubted that what we were doing was the right thing for us, despite a few people questioning it and suggesting spoon feeding, I must admit I don't know many other children Milo's age so I can't compare his eating with others who are spoon fed, but I know that he eats very well! He can master small items like raisins to big items like orange wedges and is very happy to use a spoon all by himself! He would sit in his high chair and eat all day if I let him I'm sure of that and I have yet to find anything he won't eat.

I absolutely wouldn't do anything differently and would recommend BLW to anyone. Especially after reading about the banana test as the way to discover if your baby is ready for solids. Which basically states if a baby can sit up, grab a piece of banana and put it in his mouth, he is ready. If a baby isn't ready for solid food before he can feed himself, then surely there is simply no need for mush and spoon feeding! I haven't once felt stressed or worried about how much or how little Milo is eating-everything has been totally up to him, so it takes the worry out of my hands and makes it all just lots and lots of fun!

Our new adventure is elimination communication, I'll let you know how we get on!
We will definitely be doing baby led weaning so it's great to hear that is working well for you & Milo :)
We are also really interested about the idea of elimination communication! We were reading an article about it the other day, so I look forward to hearing how that goes!
Posted by: Jenny | February 04, 2010 at 02:24 PM
Honestly I can't praise BLW enough!!
We haven't got very far with elimination communication yet, mostly because I bought a potty and then Milo became ill the next day :( but I plan to give it a go-I don't want to rush him in to anything so if it doesn't work it's not the end of the world-just thought we'd give it a try. Hope you're feeling OK and everything is going well x
Posted by: vicki | February 04, 2010 at 02:34 PM
Hey!
I ended up doing BLW with Elsie, because it was what she wanted to do. I purred everything with Tom, and he ate beautifully off the spoon, but Elsie was not and is still not interested in eating from a spoon. So she eats what we eat... i just dump it on her high chair and she helps herself! So much easier than how I did it with Tom! another thing have you been signing, the past few days she has been signing back to me, more and thank you... love it!! xx
Posted by: melody ryder | February 04, 2010 at 09:01 PM
forget to say, love the pictures, he is so cute, cant wait to see him again xx
Posted by: melody ryder | February 04, 2010 at 09:01 PM
oh my that's so exciting! I got a signing book out from the library this week and I've started with the main ones - like bath and bottle and banana(we made up our own for bottle). I hope it's not too late. Well done Elsie though that's fab!
xxxx
Posted by: vicki | February 04, 2010 at 09:05 PM
He is amazingly cute and it's great to read about your success. I'm so excited to get to try out all this sort of thing. Thank you so much for sharing it all.
Good luck with the Elimination Communication, you can do it I'm sure. =)
Posted by: Joe | February 04, 2010 at 11:10 PM