You realize quickly when you get pregnant that everyone has an opinion on everything and anything baby. I do too, of course. From sleeping to eating to disciplining and beyond, people love to tell you what you should do with your kid. So I hope it doesn't come across that I think everyone should do what we did, rather I just want share our experience.
Porter is almost a year, and is great little eater. His grandma said he 'eats like a fish'; he will eat just about anything you put in front of him and he eats A LOT. He loves to eat. I really think that he is such a great eater because of the way we feed him.
Porter never ate baby food. I had one or two containers of baby food someone gave me, and did eventually feed them to him when I was looking for variety for him, but I have never bought any baby food. Nor did I make any pureed food for him.
When it came time to start transitioning him from bottle/breastfeeding, I started seeing things about a method called Baby Led Weaning. The more I read, the more interested I was. I don't want to take a bunch of time explaining it so please read that link and maybe this one too. We decided to postpone feeding him food until six months and skipped over mushy cereals and purees and went right to giving him pieces of food. Was it scary? Yes!! It was. Were we worried about him choking? A little, but the more I read the more comfortable I felt that I needed to trust him and trust the human body that he would not swallow anything he couldn't handle. We trust that a new baby, only minutes old, can suck and swallow milk without choking so it makes sense that you can apply the same thinking to an older baby and chewing. Did he gag? Yes he did! And that was scary. He gagged a decent amount the first six weeks or so. In fact, the first six weeks were a bit tenuous. We talked about discontinuing and going to purees, but we really believed in the philosophy and just watched him closely. One of my favorite things about this period of time was it was summer and we ate on the back patio almost every evening. Porter sat there with us in his booster chair and tested out whatever foods we were eating that night. He learned what it was like to sit at the table with the family and eat. The best part was I didn't have to interrupt my dinner with spoon feeding him baby food.
For the first few months he didn't swallow or ingest much, but that was okay. It was all about exploration and learning about food. Learning how to hold it, how to bite, how different things taste. Quite often he would pick something up, taste it, make a face and drop it, only to pick it back up a again a minute later and eat it. I remember the day I felt like he finally 'got it'. I had given him some peach slices with the skin on, and he munched on a slice, completely cleaning all the flesh off the skin and discarding the skin. He loved it, and even still peaches are one of his most absolute favorite foods.
Porter has tried so many different foods this way. Cantaloupe, brussel sprouts, asparagus, blackberries, tomatoes... so many to even name. We try really hard to incorporate him into our dinners, giving him small portions of whatever we are eating. Now that he is almost a year, I realize yet another benefit of giving him table foods from the start. He doesn't need to make another food transition from jarred or pureed foods to table foods. He has been eating them all along, so they are just a part of his life.
I am always nervous to tell people we feed him this way. I don't want to be called a hippie, looked at strangely, or have to answer the dreaded question (Aren't you worried he is going to choke?). I remember having my mom over for dinner shortly after we started baby led weaning. I explained the method and the reasoning and the data and such, being very educational about it and hoping she would understand. She just smiled and said "so, you are just feeding him table food? I did that with all you kids". It was such a relief to realize that yes, at its essence that is what we are doing. Not everyone 'gets it' and that's okay. His other grandma watches him twice a week and was not comfortable with it at all. That was okay too - we would just bring whatever we were feeding him at home in a mushed up version for her to feed him. We aren't complete purists about it. We feed him with a spoon if the food calls for it. He loves greek yogurt and oatmeal. I tried to make oatmeal balls for him to pick up and eat, but could never get them quite right. Sometimes we give him soup. But mostly, he feeds himself. And I have to say, he is pretty darn good at it!
Porter is about 7 1/2 months in this video, and really enjoying sucking all the flesh off of a tomato.
