Baby-Led Weaning at 9 Months

Lunch time! Rajma (Kidney beans), Mackarel fish and Pineapple slices

We are at 9 months, 0 teeth and approximately 12 strands of hair. Our little baldy has come a long way in his eating skills (yes, even with 0 teeth he is quite capable of mashing food up in his mouth with his strong gums and palate) since we started with baby led weaning at 6 months. He is still nursing on demand and while he isn’t nursing as often as a newborn, he does love his milkies and cannot do without them. Only recently, say in the last 2-3 weeks, has he started to show actual hunger for solids – I think he’s starting to realise that food can actually fill his tummy!

Breakfasts are his favourite meal. Unfortunately – mornings are just not my thing – Kai is an ‘early-to-rise’ sort of person and once he’s up, he’ll pretty much be milling around me begging for food. I know this because as soon as I put him in his chair and place food on his plate, he’ll be quiet and gobble down his breakfast!

We are doing three meals a day now – breakfast at around 8, lunch anytime between 11-12:30 after he’s had his morning nap and then a light dinner or snack in the evening around 5 or 6 (usually fruits, or cheese or some kind of stuffed paratha). Sometimes he’ll snack in between on roasted makhana or puffed rice or dried figs.

I wouldn’t say that he eats everything I put on his plate – he’s definitely picky about some things and goes through phases of liking some things and then not touching them for a while – but that’s the nature of it and I try offering the same thing again after a while or in a different form. Sometimes he’ll try it, sometimes he won’t and that’s okay. I’ve learnt to trust him. Babies are incredibly intelligent little humans and built for survival so I know he’s not going to starve himself (plus he’s still drinking lots of breastmilk and I know that’s nourishing him just fine too) and my job is to just make sure I am offering him a good variety of whole foods so he’s getting a good variety of nutrients from whatever he does eat.

It’s been a truly liberating and totally relaxed experience. It’s been so fun watching him try new foods, eat with gusto and develop those fine motor skills. You will notice how he’s pretty confidently picking up his rajma with the pincer grip in the video near the end.

The freedom to go out to eat with Kai is also pretty awesome. We try to order something that isn’t too messy, and easy for him to eat himself. Recently, we had to stay on a college campus for three days while I was working at a conference and I didn’t have to worry at all about what Kai would eat or pack food for him, he just ate with us in the canteen and whatever was served for lunch at the conference. No problemo.

While gagging is fairly rare now, there were a few days recently when he seemed to be gagging more often. My theory (which could be totally wrong) is that he was recalibrating to his gag reflex moving back? Whatever the reason, there were a couple of major gagging moments but since we’ve been at it for months now, it really wasn’t scary for me, I just had to wait, trust and watch attentively but non-invasively as he coughed up a bit of orange or tomato skin… It’s actually pretty amazing and I wished I had recorded a few of those incidents! The human body is just so fantastically designed, it would do us all a lot of good to trust our bodies more.

So there you have it, our 9 month BLW update! Are you getting ready to introduce solids to your baby and on the fence about BLW? Did you practice BLW with your baby? Please feel free to leave a comment or email me with comments or questions!

BLW at 9 Months from Born In Bombay on Vimeo.

Cloth Diapering 101

Whether or not to cloth diaper was kind of a no-brainer for us. Some years ago, much before having babies was anywhere on my radar, a friend shared with me this simple fact: it can take an estimated 200-500 years for a single disposable diaper to decompose. Information that can never be erased from my mind. I went on to find out more unflattering information about the disposable diaper industry that sealed the deal for me before K was born. This book has a great chapter on the topic.

Six months in, forgive my bragging, but I am kind of proud of the fact that we’ve managed not to use a single disposable. I doubted it was possible and feared all the piles of laundry but thanks to all the amazing options available today, an amazing Facebook group, a lot of support from the husband and also K’s grandparents who have all chipped in with diaper washing and folding during visits, we’ve made it thus far!

I think cloth diapering is great. It’s healthier for baby. It’s chemical free. It’s definitely so much better for the planet. It’s supporting small businesses (although some cloth diaper companies are pretty big, they are nothing compared to the large conglomerate that is Pampers). It (can) lead to faster potty training (babies in disposables are not used to the sensation of being wet and thus can take longer to learn to respond to it).

But it is not easy.

You really have to be dedicated to do it if you are planning to do it full-time.

My husband for some reason thinks it’s so much easier than disposables. I don’t know where he gets this logic from. Maybe from the fact that he’s only changing diapers on the weekends and some evenings and only throwing the diapers in to the washing machine and not putting them out to dry (my least favourite job ever).

Don’t get me wrong, he’s just as committed to cloth diapering as I am. In fact, he may even be a little more obsessive about it than me. Case in point:

On a recent slightly wet holiday to the beach (the one where we accidentally let K’s little baby face get sunburned. Oops), I was ready to throw the towel in and buy a packet of disposables but he would have none of it and personally hand-washed and blow-dried all the diapers. That’s love.

I know it’s totally crazy but oh, the stories we’ll have to tell K when he’s old enough. It certainly would have been easier to not cloth diaper on holiday but in the grand scheme of things and compared to say, 200-500 years, what’s two days of hand-washing some cloth diapers?

Anyway, back to the point, ignore my delusional husband, cloth diapering is hard work. I’m being honest. I think everyone should totally cloth diaper. I think it’s GREAT but you should know a couple of things:

1. It takes a lot of time figuring out what to buy in the first place. Flats, prefolds, pockets, All-in-Ones, All-in-Twos… Say what? And then there’s all the Cloth Diapering lingo that you have to learn. It can all get a bit intimidating and confusing.

2. It can be expensive but it can also be a tiny fraction of the cost of disposables. It’s easy to get carried away with buying all the adorable prints but if you plan on having more than one child, you can use one stash of diapers multiple times and there’s also a great market for reselling cloth diapers (yes, the marvelous ol’ idea of recycling works in the cloth diapering world.)

3. It’s kind of gross spraying poop off of cloth diapers. There’s no glossing it over.

4. Figuring out a washing routine that works for your family (and your diapers) takes a bit of time and experimenting. You also need to be mindful of what laundry soap you use for the environmental impact and for the longevity of your diapers.

5. There’s no way around it, it’s a LOT of laundry.
   

If you’ve made your peace with the above, stay tuned for the Stephens’ Mansion Guide to Cloth Diapering in my next post…

#mumbai #babycare #clothdiapering #diapers

Baby Led Weaning: The Beginning.

So here we are! That oh so big milestone of starting solid foods.

After 6 months of exclusively breastfeeding, to the utter astonishment of some (how can he possibly be getting enough nourishment from just milk!? It’s amazing, isn’t it?), K is slowly getting into the idea of feeding himself with his own hands and swallowing food that isn’t liquid!

The idea of ‘baby led weaning’ (BLW) is, just as with breastfeeding, to follow the baby’s lead. Your job is to offer healthy and appropriate foods, they decide if, how and how much they eat. And they feed themselves. With their very capable hands which by the age of six months should have had plenty of practice moving to the mouth and grasping objects and moving them to the mouth to taste, gum, slobber all over. It’s really amazing. If we just stand back and watch, every step of a baby’s development is like a stepping stone to the next milestone. It’s best not to interfere!

The most pressing question that everyone has with BLW is, “but won’t he choke?!”. I had that question too because it’s just so commonplace to see babies being fed solids progressively from super smooth, to mushy with bigger lumps and so on… From what I’ve learned in theory, babies have an amazing ‘gag reflex’ and this reflex is much closer to the opening of the mouth when the baby is just beginning to get ready for solids so when he does start eating, the reflex works very effectively to prevent any large pieces of food that cannot be swallowed from going anywhere near the airway. This gag reflex helps the baby to learn how much food he should put in his mouth to prevent gagging, how far he can push it in and how much he should chew to make smaller pieces to swallow. As he’s learning, anything that he cannot manage to chew or swallow simply moves to the front of the mouth and falls out. This reflex moves back closer to the airway as he gets older so it’s really great to let the baby practice with the safety net of a very easily activated gag reflex in the early months to prevent choking later on.

In theory it sounds amazing and you want with all your heart to believe it and trust the process but in practice, I won’t lie, it’s scary as heck. Since we’ve started, Robert and I have watched K eat with baited breath as obviously too large pieces of whatever he’s eating disappears into his mouth. We have to use all the willpower we can muster to not stick our fingers in his mouth and pull it out (which is actually more dangerous as our fingers could accidentally push the food further back). Every single time though, after maneuvering the food in his mouth for a few seemingly endless moments, it always always dribbles out and we learn to trust him and his body a little more each time.

There’s so much more I’d like to share but for now, here’s a quick video of K enjoying some steamed apples!

For more on Baby-Led Weaning, buy yourself a copy of this book!

BLW from Born In Bombay on Vimeo.

#BLW #6monthold #solidfood #weaning #introducingsolidfoods #babyledweaning