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Attachment Parenting
tjkdlhb
member
BLW anxiety
tjkdlhb
member
I really want to do BLW... I've read the cookbook version... I like it for so many reasons ... it seems to have some great long term benefits ... but I can't get past two things. 1. Choking and 2. DD is tiny and the nurse has some apprehension that she may not get the calories she needs even though she will still be BF. I would start with Avocado, which is fatty...I am also nervous because the few people I've mentioned it to freaked out about DD choking...which doesn't help my own nervousness about it.
Convince me. (or not...) pros/cons?!? It shouldn't be this stressful to decide how to feed a baby should it?
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Re: BLW anxiety
We loved it. DS never choked, although he gagged a bit. It just made a lot of sense to me to cut to the chase and feed him how and what we wanted him to eat, not put in a bunch of needless intermediate steps.
The calories didn't factor into it for me. DS breastfed like mad. He's on the small side, but that's genetics I think. You don't want to force a kid to eat.
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As for the calories, they should still be getting the vast majority of calories from breastmilk or formula, so it's a moot point, either way they're fed.
DS2 - Oct 2010 (my VBAC baby!)
We started BLW before we had heard the term BLW before. DD refused all purees and did not like to be spoon fed. We could rarely get more than one bite in her mouth. She would however steal food from our plate or from my hands while I was eating so I started giving her tiny bites of finger food and she actually eagerly ate a bite. It was very hit or miss when we gave her solids. She has never been a big eater and up until this month she barely ate any solids. I would offer her a variety of finger foods and she would maybe eat one or two bites. Many times she just played with her food and didn't eat any of it. We started with just giving her finger foods at dinner and then as she started to eat more than one bite, I added lunch and then when she got better again I added breakfast. She has only been eating three meals of solids for about a month so it has been a very slow progress. We were not stressed about it since she got all the nutrition she needed from breast milk and at this point it is still just practice, setting a routine and getting into the habit of sitting at the table for meals.
I'm surprised a nurse would be concerned about calorie intake in the form of solids at only 5 months..... they don't NEED solids at 5 months. They are just exploring solids around that age. At 5 months my DD would eat maybe one bite of banana and we were trying to get her to eat some baby oatmeal on occasion. My pediatrician didn't seem concerned at all and my DD has always been a string bean. And my DD didn't start eating solids on a daily basis until she was 6-7 months before that I sometimes skipped a day or two of solids and just gave her BM since at that point she was refusing 99.9% of the solids we offered so not like it made that much of difference.
LOs usually gag when they first start eating and it is ok. They will learn how to swallow solids. It just takes time. My DD actually gagged just as much while we were trying to get her to eat purees since she didn't like them at all and was trying to get them out of her mouth. I can't remember how long it took my DD, but it took her a little bit of time for her to stop gagging at every meal. She didn't mind gagging at all. She would gag, spit the food out and then just pick up another piece and move on. It was scary for me the first couple times she did it. I know the infant heimlich maneuver and I have the directions for it posted in my kitchen. Knowing this has helped me feel more comfortable. I also made all her finger foods extremely small for the longest time.
I found that blueberries, avocado, and peas were great first finger foods.
I'm so glad we did BLW. Saved a lot on purees for sure! And since we mostly feed her what we eat it is so easy, she gets a good variety of foods, and it is easy to give her her fresh food instead of food from jars.
Good luck and try not to stress about it.
Choking is pretty rare. Gagging is normal and part of the learning process. Some think spoon feeding can increase the risk of choking. The baby learns to suck food to the back of their mouth/throat. Which is okay for purees. However they have not actually learned how to move food around in their mouth and deal with it in a proper manner.
The main source of nutrition for a baby under the age of 1 should be breast milk or formula, so I do not understand that concern at all.
Overall we have been very happy with BLW. I have not read the cookbook version of the book, so I don't know how detailed it is. Maybe pick up a copy of the regular book to help ease some of your fears?
Thank you for your responses!
The concern about weight is more specific to DD since she is very tiny. (10- 1/2 lbs at her 4 month appt.) I've had to bring her to a dietician because of her weight, who was impressed by the amount she is eating from BM. (wet diaper counts etc) I asked her about BLW and while she said that from what I told her about it it seemed to be along the guidelines of what they are recommending now, but making sure DD gets enough calories due to her low birthweight/slow gain is her main concern. She wasn't overly familiar and I gave her the book to read. She was also going to ask some of the other dieticians if they knew anything about it. I am planning to do extended BF when I start solids with her.
I really like that BLW means that DD controls how much and what she eats, since while DD is tiny now, there is a fair bit of obesity in our family. I don't want to ruin her ability to understand her hunger by force feeding her. My mother swears that when my sister was an infant that they HAD to eat Xnumber of spoonfuls/day otherwise the parent wasn't doing their job...around the time I was an infant (3 years later) that idea had changed and it was "don't overfeed baby". It may be coincidence, but my sister has always battled her weight, while I haven't.