B is for.. broccoli! Banana!

Carter's due date was six months ago Monday, so he's now officially six months old. That means, among other things, that it's likely his gut is now closed and he's on his way to be ready for solid food. We're doing something called "baby-led weaning" (BLW), where weaning is used in the British sense of weaning onto food, rather than the American sense of off of milk.

The basic idea of BLW is that babies don't need to consume solid foods during their first year. Breastmilk (or formula) should make up the vast majority of their diet until they are at least a year old. Solid foods are introduced just to allow the baby a chance to "play" with food, to get used to different tastes and textures. The baby may or may not actually consume any food, and that's okay. When he's ready, he'll play less and eat more. He'll be eating solid food for the rest of his life, so there's no rush. :-)

I was pretty sure Carter wasn't really developmentally ready to actually eat anything, but I thought I'd give him some foods to see what he would do with them. On Sunday night, we were having steamed broccoli with our dinner, so we gave Carter a piece to see what he would do.



Heh. A few minutes later, I gave him another piece:



Okay, so the broccoli wasn't a hit, but it was fun to watch him handle it and taste it! That's really what this is all about. :-)

Monday night we went out for Mexican, and I gave him a little taste of guacamole. I didn't give him much, because I wasn't sure what all was in it and I want to stick to whole foods for as long as possible. Here's a picture I took with my phone:



He seemed to like it okay, but was actually much more interested in the water in his sippy cup!

Tuesday afternoon, I was having some banana, and thought I'd give Carter a taste. This was more of a hit:



When that first piece got too slimy, I gave him a piece with the peel still on (a trick someone mentioned on one of the BLW sites I was looking at), and he seemed to be able to get a better hold of that:



He seemed to actually eat a little of the banana. This morning when I changed his diaper, there was some very green poop in it, which is really unusual for Carter -- and also extremely unusual for him to poop overnight. Green often means there is a lot of bile in the poop, which means the banana was pretty much flushed out of his system. In other words, he's not ready.

I think I'll try to give him food once a week for a while to see what he does with it. I think it will be two or three months (based on what I've read online) before he'll really be interested. And that's fine with me. :-)