There were so many great posts related to breastfeeding!  Don’t forget you can help normalize breastfeeding by participating in the Carnival of Nursing in Public.

• Avent Survey Suggests Half Of New Moms Aren’t Comfortable with breastfeeding in public from A Good Clean Life

• Kardashian’s Call to Cover Up from Code Name: Mama

• Side-lying nursing: A breastfeeding tutorial to give… from Hobo Mama – Talk about practical! In addition to my post about FAQs on Cosleeping, this post will really help you begin your cosleeping journey.  Learning to nurse in a side-lying position was a God-send to me!

There were several great posts about Religion and Breastfeeding:

• Breastfeeding in Church: A Picture of Christ’s Sacrificial… from peaceful parenting

• When less is more from Caffeinated Catholic Mama

• Morality & Breastfeeding in Public from Maman A Droit

A couple To Do items for you:

iTunes from Why Not Train A Child? – A Gentle Discipline call to action! “The Pearls are asking their followers to go to iTunes and leave positive ratings and reviews for their shows.  We should probably go help balance that out.”

Settling the Cosleeping Controversy with Dr. James… from Attachment Parenting International Blog – this is a live teleseminar with James McKena of the sleep institute. DATE: Monday, June 28, 2010 TIME: 9 pm ET/6 pm PT

Some great How-to’s and Food for Thought:

• Essential Equipment for Baby Led Weaning from Diary of a First Child – You can also read about our BLW journey.

• Infant Massage: An encounter of love that goes beyond… from Attachment Parenting International Blog

• Should We Wait to Cut the Umbilical Cord? from Attachment Parenting International Blog – See also my posts of the Amazing Placenta.

• The Semantics of Babywearingfrom Code Name: Mama – Does babywearing objectify kids?

• Why do babies get supplemented in the hospital? A… from Public Health Doula

In the Laugh Out Loud catgory:

• If Truth in Advertising Was Applied to School Mottos from Unschooling Rules – This will make you laugh.  E.g. “Dedicated 110% to compliance with state and federal guidelines created by politicians you have since voted out”

And two honorary members of my What Every Parent Should Know series documenting toxins and threats to our health:

• Please Don’t Pass Sterility To Your Children from A Nourishing Home – What every parent should know about GMOs.

• Ten Fluoride Facts from peaceful parenting

Aellyn loves to eat.  It is a game for her!  She doesn’t want me to feed her and that doesn’t bother me.  I want her to feel independent and to experience everything about the food herself.  She often makes a yucky face and then looks at us and then goes back to eating.  I’ve come to learn that her yucky face doesn’t mean she doesn’t like it because we haven’t given her a single food she’s refused!  We recently decided to have her start sharing what we are eating.  There are no food sensitivities in our family so we felt comfortable moving forward (if you have sensitivities I’d be more cautious in timing new foods).  The only things we do different for her is leave off sauces – we eat spicy stuff and really it is just added salt, sugar, etc. that she doesn’t need right now.

She has had:

• carrots
• asparugus
• broccoli
• green beans
• cauliflower
• squash
• zucchini
• sugar snap peas (in the pod)
• potato (mashed and baked)
• sweet potato
• banana
• baked apple
• peaches
• blueberries (mashed)
• yogurt (yobaby – the only thing we spoon feed)
• cheerios (and other small cereals/gerber graduate type foods)
• roast beef
• chicken
• salmon
• pasta
• ravioli (cheese)
• perogies with spinach

That’s all I can think of now.  The only things we are truly avoiding is milk, honey, nuts, strawberries, citrus, nut butters, peas (too small), … can’t think of anything else now.

I’m so surprised at how easy this has been.  And effortless!  No time spoon feeding, no time pureeing, no cost buying baby food.  No waste (baby food jars and such).  I feel her pincher grasp has grown by leaps and bounds becaue of this and she is developing a very good relationship with food and with family dinner time.  If I hadn’t read about BLW I’d never have thought to try it.  I hope if you are reading this for the first time you’ll consider giving it a try too!

Picture:  Aellyn eating cheerios – and leaving one on her chin!

There are really two topics – 1) how does breastmilk play into the diet of a food-eating baby? and 2) what is the most natural way of eating for babies?

The first topic is called complementary feeding – meaning the period between exclusive breasfeeding and complete weaning.  The WHO details the nutritional needs of breastfed babies after age 6 months in their document Guiding Principles for Complementary Feeding of the Breastfed Child.  Breastmilk provides the majority of a baby’s nutritional needs through 1 year.  According to KellyMom.com  breastfeeding should continue at the same level while solid foods are introduced and only begin to decline near or after the first birthday.  As you can see in the chart above solid food calories (complementary feeding) are first additional calories on top of the breastmilk calories and only later do they begin to provide a greater percentage of calories.

If introducing solid food is not primarily for nutrition or caloric energy, then why do we introduce solids during the last half of the first year?  For fun!  Just as babies put toys, feet, cell phones, etc. in their mouths to explore their world they will do the same thing with foods.  Anyone who has spoon fed a baby knows that most of the food does not end up in the belly.  Children at this age use food to explore taste and texture and to further hone their fine motor skills at getting the food into their mouths.

Continuing that train of thought: if the purpose of eating in the first year of life is not nutritional then what should baby eat.  ”Baby food” – that is jars of puréed fruits and vegetables – have become the ubiquitous version of what babies should eat.  However, this convenience food is little over a century old.  In the mid-19th century artificial baby foods were created for sick children and were bought in pharmacies or given by doctors.  It wasn’t until the 1920′s that commercially marketed baby food was generally embraced as a convenience food.  Prepared baby food of this sort leaves much to be desired ; however, the method of feeding is just as counterintuitive upon inspection.  If babies explore the world with their hands and mouths…why are we feeding them with a spoon?

Aparently I wasn’t the first to think this odd.  Gill Rapley, a UK nurse and UNICEF advisor,  first researched the concept of giving whole foods to babies as her Master’s thesis where she coined the term Baby Led Weaning (BLW).

Sounds intimidating, strange, new-agey?  Another “weird-o” hippie parenting idea from Paige, right?  ;)  But, seriously give this one a second because it is really so obvious once we turn off the Gerber brainwashing.  The short of it is this:  
Skip purées.  Skip spoon feeding.  Give your baby food.  Let them eat.

Crazy right?

To me this seems to flow naturally from breastfeeding.  I feed Aellyn on cue when she wants to be fed.  I don’t watch the clock or ration out her food – or try to get her to eat a certain amount.  Breastfeeding is purely baby-led.  She decides when and she decides how.  Why should that change when she starts getting solids?  And remember, since food is for fun and not nutrition in the first year, you don’t have to painstakingly make sure baby gets x number of tablespoons down the gullet!

But babies can’t eat food, you say!!!  Here are some highlights from the BLW basic guidelines from Gill:

But won’t the baby choke? 
Many parents worry about babies choking. However, there is good reason to believe that babies are at less risk of choking if they are in control of what goes into their mouth than if they are spoon fed. This is because babies are not capable of intentionally moving food to the back of their throats until after they have developed the ability to chew. And they do not develop the ability to chew until after they have developed the ability to reach out and grab things. The ability to pick up very small things develops later still. Thus, a very young baby cannot easily put himself at risk because he cannot get small pieces of food into his mouth. Spoon feeding, by contrast, encourages the baby to suck the food straight to the back of his mouth, potentially making choking more likely.  
There is no need to cut food into mouth-sized pieces. Indeed, this will make it difficult for a young baby to handle. A good guide to the size and shape needed is the size of the baby’s fist, with one important extra factor to bear in mind: Young babies cannot open their fist on purpose to release things. This means that they do best with food that is chip-shaped or has a built-in ‘handle’ (like the stalk of a piece of broccoli). They can then chew the bit that is sticking out of their fist and drop the rest later – usually while reaching for the next interesting-looking piece. As their skills improve, less food will be dropped.

There are many benefits of this method of baby feeding:

1. A baby that is developmentally able to grab, chew, and swallow is more likely to be developmentally able to digest the food.
2. Baby learns to eat as much or as little as he needs – as he did with breastfeeding.
3. Meals are not a battle to shove strained peas past pursed lips and hence babies can enjoy a better relationship with food that can lead to less pickiness later.
4. Since you aren’t spoon feeding meals can be family time and baby will learn that eating is a social as well as biological experience.
5. BLW’d babies generally learn to use utensils sooner because they can experiment themselves.

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And the photo gallery
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