Baby Led Weaning

After much research prior to Elijah's birth and during his first few months earth side, I knew I wanted to do baby led weaning. BLW is gradually weaning from milk and allowing your baby to self feed solid foods at their own pace. No purees, which means no spoon feeding. A lot of parents start the process at 6 months or so, but many parents are waiting longer if their baby isn't showing much interest in food. You can exclusively breastfeed your baby up to a year old until you need to start introducing solids.

Eli hasn't been totally exclusively breastfed, he's had some solids here and there, but no full meals. Until your baby is a year old food is really just for experimentation anyway, but now that he's had his first birthday it's time I start introducing more foods into his diet, and daily.

Today for his first full meal I gave him some brown rice, black beans, apples, and pears. I have to admit, coming up with food ideas for Eli is a little tricky. I obviously want him to have a wide variety of foods every day and of course it needs to be well balanced.

I'm going to work on making a weekly menu and making foods that both Eli and I can eat together, rather than making my food and then making him different things. I will appreciate any and all suggestions! We eat a vegetarian diet, so no meat suggestions please.

I'm looking forward to this new chapter, it's always fun watching your little one learning and experiencing new things!

I am in hearts with this vibrating rocking chair thing that my friend Nicole is letting me borrow for Elijah. I can put him in it for nap time and have him close to me so I can keep an eye on him and he loves the vibration.

We started our nightly routine a few days ago. So far so good. We are NOT putting him on a set schedule, but babies like routines, so we're starting one in hopes that he will go to be at a normal-ish hour. We give him a bath at around 9:30, then I nurse him and if he's not asleep after that then I lay with him for a little bit. He's generally tired around that time anyway, but this way he will start associating bath and nursing at night with bedtime. Last night he slept for about 4 hours! I put him in the co-sleeper to start with and then by the time I am in bed and he wakes up I move him to our bed and fall asleep with him while he's nursing. I am getting really attached to sleeping in bed with him, I don't think I could put him in a crib even if I wanted to!

Tonight I am going out for the first time in almost a year!! My friend Nicole is having a mamas margarita night. Jason is going to watch Elijah while I go have a much needed good time. It will be fun to meet some other mamas too. I don't think I will make it past one margarita until I am feeling a bit tipsy (or drunk). I hate to pump and dump but I have so much milk that it won't really make a difference anyway. I can seriously pump 4 oz. from each breast in one sitting. That's 2 meals right there! I started my freezer stash and so far I have 14 meals for Elijah. I am going to continue stocking up so we can have it if there's ever a need for it.

Our washing machine broke but we just fixed it, thank god. Cloth diapers + no washing machine = not awesome. Jason ordered some $10 part and it did the trick! Thank god for not having to spend money on a whole new washing machine.

I should get going and do some stuff that I normally can't do while Elijah is still asleep!