And we're off!

Today was Anya's official start to blw.  It was quite exciting and also a bit nerving at the same time.

I know she's ready for food.  She's showing all the signs, ticks all the boxes and is 6 months in 2 days.  Plus when she sees people eat she starts to 'practise' chew.  She was doing it on holiday watching a couple eating their lunch and they couldn't stop laughing.

She always has a sleep about 9.30 ish so I went to buy the highchair, which I'm really pleased with.  Not as cheap as the Ikea one but considering they're completely sold out I had to get one that was both suitable and cheap. So with my purse £25 lighter we begin.

I gave her a bit of banana for lunch which she mainly played with.  Everytime she picks up food they go straight into her mouth so she knows exactly what she's doing.  Most of the banana ended up on the floor or mashed on her tray but no gagging and a couple of classic facial expressions.

For tea I was making mushroom stroganoff with jacket potato.  I cooked her some potato wedges so she could hold them and gave her a couple of large strips of red and green peppers and a mushroom.

She picked up the mushroom had a little play, tasted it, then threw it back onto the tray in disgust!  She had us all in stitches.

Next she picked up the wedges.  She sucked them, squashed them, chewed them and literally had a great time with them.  Each time she dropped them she would go back for more.  And yes - there was gagging involved.  Not very nice and if you're not used to it or didn't expect it, it could be quite scary.  My mum didn't like it at all and had a lot of reservations about blw just because of the gagging.  My husband didn't mind too much but kept asking a lot of questions just to make sure we were doing things right.

But the gagging was fine and everything came up that needed to come up.

When she had finally finished with the potatoes she moved onto the peppers.  I think she managed quite well with these and you could see she had taken some of the flesh off and eaten it (I think, the nappy will tell!).  But again came the gagging.  Probably because she tried to ram the whole of the strip into her mouth.

I think the gagging does put a lot of people off and at times even I was watching her intently to make sure she was fine.  But after doing loads of reading and seeing videos on youtube gagging goes hand in hand with blw.  And hopefully, as research indicates, she'll stop gagging sooner than most babies as she learns control over her food and how much she should put in.

I'm not sure if I go straight to 3 meals a day plus little snacks now or do I just give maybe lunch and tea.  It probably doesn't make much difference seeing as she isn't 'eating' most of it yet so perhaps she'll just play a little.

Photos to follow!