BLW Bootcamp: Lessons Learned from 10 Babies Starting Solid Foods

Katie Ferraro (59s):

And what I learned from Baby JoJo is that while all of the babies I previously worked with, I would never strap them in at six or seven months of age, right? Cause I wanna be able to easily extract them from the high chair in the event that there's a choking hazard. I don't wanna be fumbling with the straps. This baby was popping up at six months and she needed the straps on Hey there. I'm Katie Ferraro, registered dietitian, college nutrition professor and mom of seven specializing in baby led weaning here on the Baby-Led Weaning Made Easy podcast. I help you strip out all of the noise and nonsense about feeding, leaving you with the confidence and knowledge you need to give your baby a safe start to solid foods using baby-led weaning.

Katie Ferraro (1m 41s):

All Babies are different, right? I know you guys do it. You don't mean to, but you're comparing yourself all the time to other babies," Oh my friend's baby is as old as my baby, but her baby has teeth. Or that one's sitting up and that one's rolling over, or that one's sleeping through the night." We can't help sometimes, but compare our babies. But I do want to remind you, when it comes to starting solid foods, all babies are different. And if I've learned anything through the years as at baby-led weaning dietitian, is that just when you think you've seen everything, I'm like, Oh, I know exactly how these first 10 Foods with this baby's gonna go. No way. They always surprise you. So what I'm doing in today's episode is I'm sharing 10 Babies that I've recently worked with and I wanna share 10 tips or 10 things that I remember about each of these Babies or I learned from each of these Babies because it's not to say that it's definitely gonna happen to your baby, but I just wanna show you the variety of scenarios that you might encounter when you start solid foods.

Katie Ferraro (2m 30s):

So first up is Baby Jordan. Jordan is our dietitian Katelynn's oldest nephew. And his mom Jordan was like the first of the kids in their family. So she wasn't super stoked on starting solid foods. She really wanted to do spoon feeding. She kind of heard about baby led weaning from another sister who had a baby, but who wasn't quite ready. So the older one started with spoon feeding And. The mom was super nervous and it wasn't until her sister's baby hit six months of age and they decided to do baby led weaning that Jordan's mom was like, Oh, wait a minute, I definitely can do this. And so the takeaway message here is that scene really is believing. Waiting until six months is so important you guys. But if you see another baby feeding themselves, it happens all the time at restaurants.

Katie Ferraro (3m 10s):

I love it when you go out to restaurants and people are like, Oh my gosh, that baby's eating real food. If you've never seen a baby feed themselves, maybe you don't believe that it can happen. So, you can make the transition even if you start with solid foods, even older infants benefit from more opportunities to feed themselves. And I wanna remind you that if you're scared of choking, research shows us that the babies who have the least experience with finger Foods, they're actually the ones who are at the higher risk of choking. So we've got to let our Babies practice with finger foods, and you can do that from six months of age and beyond. All right, next up is Baby Sienna, the gaggiest baby I've ever seen. Sometimes parents are like, Oh, my baby has a sensitive gag reflex. I'm like, Oh, really? All babies gag when they start solid foods. This is a baby who had six months of age, was still gagging on her pacifier.

Katie Ferraro (3m 52s):

I mean, from the first time she put the spoon in her mouth, she was gagging. Her mom, baby Sienna's mom, Christina is a nurse. And even though she had done hundred first foods and baby led weaning with their older baby, with Sienna could tell every time the BABY gagged, especially early on mom's, you know, tensions were rising, blood pressure was rising and she was a little bit nervous. But one thing about Sienna was I was so surprised they live local So. I saw them regularly throughout like the six to 12 month period by eight months of age because Sienna was practicing two to three times a day. The gagging basically dissipated. And so practice really makes progress. Gagging is a natural and necessary part of learning how to eat, but the more you practice, the quicker your baby will get past that and master these different textures.

Katie Ferraro (4m 34s):

So moms of gagging, babies, listen up. You got to practice. And watching videos of other babies gagging and recovering on their own can really build confidence in your baby's ability to do the same. I know we're on a podcast, so watching videos is kind of like, that's not helping me right now. If you're on YouTube, I do have a YouTube channel now it's just slash baby led weaning. And we have lots of gagging videos there. It's kind of a weird thing. Well, And the really jacks up your algorithm when you start searching for baby gagging videos. But they're some of our most popular videos because parents just wanna see what it looks like. What does it sound like? What do I do? How does the BABY recover so that again, you can build confidence in your baby's ability to do that. Next baby is baby Frankie. So when Baby Frankie came over, it was day four and we were trying lamb, and this is my sister-in-law's baby.

Katie Ferraro (5m 17s):

It was her third baby. So they'd done hundred first foods with their first two. She's like, I know this baby-led weaning thing. The baby sits down, the baby's eating some soft shreddable strips of lamb that I had made. And he gags pretty hard as babies will do, by the way, gagging does not mean that your baby can't handle that texture. And baby Frankie vomited all over the table. And I was like, Whoa, that's a lot of milk that just all over my table. And I was like, Hey, Cece to his mom, my sister-in-law, like when did Baby Frankie have a bottle? She's like, Oh, he had a bottle right before we came in the house to eat lamb. And I was like, Are you serious? Like she said, Well, you didn't tell me not to. And I realized, okay, a lot of times parents think, Okay, I'm gonna get the BABY super full so that when they come to the table, they're content and they're satiated and they can learn how to eat.

Katie Ferraro (5m 58s):

And that's a good idea. But super duper full is not a good idea. And that bottle fed babies will sometimes need up to a one hour pad between the end of their milk feed And, the beginning of their solid food feed. Breastfed babies. You guys know volume wise, they're never really drinking that much. So I know a lot of breastfed Babies are worked with a lot where you just have a snack from the breast, sit down at the table, eat gag. They're not gonna Vomit, but you put six to eight ounces of formula or breast milk in a baby's stomach via a bottle, and then they gag a particularly involved gag can elicit vomit. So, let's build in a one hour pad next time between the end of Solid Food, And, the end of the milk And, the beginning of the solid food feed, in order to give the babies stomach time to empty and a little bit of vomiting, just you, you know is to be expected.

Katie Ferraro (6m 40s):

Actually, one of our top five most downloaded podcast episodes you guys is episode number 20. It's all about vomit. People love to learn about vomit. A little bit of vomit is typical, but if your babies constantly vomiting because you're feeding them when their bellies are full of milk, they're gonna start to have negative associations with food and feeding. So build in a pad for the bottle fed babies at the end of the milk bottle before Solid food, especially if they're particularly gagging babies. All right, next baby is Babies Skylar. Another lamb story. So Baby Skylar was our assistant Geneva and our videographer Jeremy, their first baby, and they live on a boat. So we did a whole series baby led weaning on a boat and how to make food safe for Babies to eat in small place. It was super fun for me, really challenging because they had very limited place to prep food.

Katie Ferraro (7m 22s):

And so they also don't eat a lot of meat. So we pressure cooked to some lamb because it was, it takes less battery or whatever than slow cooking. Like slow cooking is great if you have like access to electricity overnight for eight hours. She's like, I gotta make these Foods as fast as possible because they're on a generator or whatever it is on a boat that you don't wanna have stuff plugged in for very long. So I did stew meat, And the stew meat for the lamb. Even though I did it the way I'd done it like a million times before, it was just a particular cut of meat with, I did it with a lot of low sodium broth. The lamb ended up being not as soft as I had wanted it, but we were on the boat and I was like, Oh, well how am I? We are gonna do lamb. So we period some of it and then put it on a preloaded spoon and she tried it. But the strips of lamb from the stmi were so tough that when Baby Skylar was eating it, she gagged so hard.

Katie Ferraro (8m 4s):

It's as close as I've ever come to having a baby that I work with choke and obviously we're CPR certified and know what to do in the event that a baby chokes and choking is a very rare but real risk So I highly recommend taking a CPR course. I'll link up the one that I recommend along with the discount code in the show notes for this episode. So, you haven't done CPR do that. But this incident with Skylar was like so nerve wracking that I kind of changed my tune on lamb. And I no longer make stew meat from lamb for Babies anymore. I only do leg of lamb roast. It's a little bit more expensive. So sometimes parents are like, Oh my God, I'm gonna pay $20 for a piece of meat than I'm gonna feed my baby. But I've consistently had better results with soft shreddable strips of meat coming from a leg of lamb roast as compared to stew meat.

Katie Ferraro (8m 45s):

Next baby, Baby Alma. Oh my gosh, this was so fun. Our dietetic intern, Anna, her baby niece Alma came and the mom was like, I'm down to try baby-led weaning. I do the first 10 days of baby-led weaning and kidney beans are on the list. So I mentioned. We hop around in five, five step feeding framework where we introduce five new Foods a week. And so the first food comes from the fruit category, the second from the vegetables, the third food of the week comes from the starchy Foods category. The fourth food of the week comes from protein And the fifth one is an allergen foods. So our team was like, Hey, we haven't done kidney beans in the first week of baby-led weaning. And I was like, that's a really hard one to do, right? Because babies don't have their Pinta grasp at six and seven months of age. So they can't pick up small pieces of food like a kidney be, right? That's kind of antithetical to baby-led weaning. We don't offer small pieces of food early on.

Katie Ferraro (9m 26s):

Long story short, I made up my favorite recipe for of all time for baby-led weaning as a way to feed this baby kidney beans. And so we had done tomatoes the day before. So I made a little kind of just saute of mashed kidney beans and tomatoes. I pureed it. She'd also already had egg by this point too. Must been in week two where we were doing the kidney beans. So I made a little batter and anytime you put an egg in anything, then you can definitely bake it and it kind of pops up a little bit, makes nice little mini loaf pan of these kidney bean pies with some seasoning in it, no salt of course, and then cut it into strips about the size of an adult pinky finger and baby almost able to pick up the kidney beans and feed it to herself. And it's actually one of our most popular recipes whenever we share it on social media, I send it out email.

Katie Ferraro (10m 9s):

People always write back like, Thank you so much. I had no idea other than making fritters over and over and over how to do the legumes. So if you are not already on my email list every Sunday I send out an email with the baby-led weaning recipe of the week. If you like getting those emails in your inbox, check out the show notes for this episode and they'll tell you how to sign up. But I love kidney bean pie. It's now one of my favorite recipes. Also this beautiful like kidney bean color and babies just love to eat foods of different colors. So, I'm glad that they made me do kidney being in week two because we kind of stumbled onto this amazing recipe that works so well for baby-led weaning. And I love, love, love, love making little pies, cakes, fritters in them, mini loaf pan instead of a muffin tin cuz a muffin tin is circular, right? So if you cut it into the pieces into strips to feed your baby, you kind of have all these scraps that you can't use.

Katie Ferraro (10m 52s):

But with a mini loaf pan, there's no scraps because you cut the pieces exactly the size of your adult pinky finger and there's nothing left over. You can freeze the extra ones for later. I add salt and cheese to 'em for my own kids. It's like kind of a random breakfast food that we eat sometimes. But that's the nice thing about baby led weaning, right? You can adapt some of these Foods to make them flavorful for you by adding salt, but the baby can eat them. If, you serve the versions that don't have salt in. All right, next up is Baby Layne. This is where I learned what a social baby was. So Baby Layne was over, we were trying solid foods and he wasn't really into it. This is a pandemic baby. He hadn't spent a lot of time around other kids. He has one sister who had Al also done the 100 First Foods program. So mom was like, Yeah, I know how to do this, but this is weird. My second baby's like not really eating foods.

Katie Ferraro (11m 33s):

And what was so interesting is that he wouldn't really eat with us when it was me and mom and Baby Layne and then when the other kids would come home from school and we would try it again. Baby Layne was all about eating when there were other children at the table. And so sometimes we talk about making, creating a peaceful feeding environment where there's no other distractions. And like if you come to my house where my seven kids are over and any other siblings of the BABY, like it is not quiet or peaceful, all the kids are sitting around just having their snack after school and then baby Layne like three days in a row would not eat with us. But the second there were other kids there, he was totally jamming on it. So just know that some Babies are really social Babies and you don't have to isolate them and make them eat by themselves and quiet. He liked the experience of being in the high chair and eating around the other kids And.

Katie Ferraro (12m 15s):

The next baby is baby Luke. So Luke is another one of Katelynn's nephews and we did, this is the baby who had had an allergic reaction to eggs. So they have some pretty strong food allergies in their family. And so mom was kind of on the lookout knowing that other Babies in the family had had food allergies. And this particular baby at their nine month appointment, the doctor gave the green light to do an egg Ladder. So we've done other episodes on the egg ladder and how you can use an egg ladder to reintroduce egg to babies that previously not been able to tolerate or eat egg because of Allergy in some cases. And so Carina Venter, who's one of the world's leading pediatric food Allergy experts and who wrote the egg ladder that gets used in research and protocol, et cetera. This is back in episode 124. So if you're interested in the idea of an egg ladder mom was doing Carina's egg ladder to reintroduce the foods.

Katie Ferraro (13m 0s):

And she wasn't super into baby-led weaning. She's like, I cannot handle the mess. But once she realized that like from a medical standpoint, she needed to progress through these different versions of baked egg in order to get the baby to be able to tolerate egg by itself, it was funny how she totally became okay with a mess. I remember talking to mom after and she was like, I realize that you say it all the time, but getting messy is part of learning how to eat. And that if the only way my baby could get the egg into his mouth was by making a mess and feeding himself, I realize that that's actually like the developmentally appropriate thing for him to be doing. So if the mess is stressing you out, I hope your baby doesn't have an egg Allergy. But it almost took a medical situation for the mom to realize, Oh wait a minute, I have to let the baby feed themselves this amount of egg in this form.

Katie Ferraro (13m 42s):

And yes, it was messy, but at the end of the day, the BABY was so enjoying being able to eat Foods by himself. And the family was so enjoying not having to restrict egg once he eventually was able to eat it. Baby eight baby Jaelynn, this is another one of Katelynn's nieces and nephews, and this is the baby again, lots of food allergies where really kind of honed in on like when your baby has an allergic reaction to food. If it's, if it's true anaphylaxis, and I know that sounds scary, but death from anaphylaxis in infancy is almost unheard of. Like yes, it's scary to have an allergic reaction, but we learn your baby's allergic to that food. And then we down the road, we'll get testing, but we don't test usually infants for food. Allergy, you just avoid feeding that food. But with Jaelynn, when she tried egg for the second time, she didn't have a reaction on the first time.

Katie Ferraro (14m 26s):

It was the second time. And that's an important point too, is that if your baby's going to have an allergic reaction to food, it will occur on the second or subsequent exposure. A lot of times there's environmental exposure if people in the house eat eggs and the BABY then exposed to the protein the first time they eat it, it might be the first time it went in their mouth, but it's not the first time they were exposed to it. But this was the BABY. Second time she ate it was when she had the reaction. And this was a very chill baby who all of a sudden went ballistic. Okay, So, you guys are probably familiar with the fact that a baby who has a reaction to food, it's most oftentimes the food Allergy reaction is going to involve the skin. It's gonna be hives which are red, raised, itchy patches, sometimes just around the face, but a lot of times they'll spread to the whole body if they go away on their own And, the child's in no other distress and there's nothing else happening.

Katie Ferraro (15m 7s):

It's not necessarily a sign of true food allergy. There's lots of reasons why babies can react to foods, and it's not that they're gonna have to a lifetime of not being able to eat that food. But in Jaelynn's case, it was the secondary. So there was hives everywhere, but it was the baby being inconsolable where a baby was usually really chill, like she was screaming her head off. That's what the sign that the parents were like, Oh my gosh, this is the second symptom. So this really is a true sign of food, Allergy and some of the other signs of food Allergy. If your baby has hives, yes, keep an eye on your baby, but if there's swelling, if there's vomiting, if there's diarrhea, if there's difficulty or labored breathing, so like really heavy chest or belly breathing, if the baby has a market change in demeanor, that's the sign that your baby is having a food allergy reaction.

Katie Ferraro (15m 51s):

And so once the family saw, okay, yeah, there's hives, we've seen that before from other babies and other foods, that's not super concerning. But when she lost it and she was really, really, really in distress, that's when the family took her to the emergency room. So I know the food allergy stuff can be scary, but it's important to know the signs and symptoms of food Allergy. And I have lots of other content for you here on the podcast on YouTube and my emails about how to deal with that if your baby does have an allergic reaction to food. Baby number nine that I learned from multiples. This is Baby Henry. He's actually one of my own babies and I, the lesson that Henry taught me is that especially with multiples, all babies get ready to eat on their own timeframe. And I always share a story about Babies Henry's that he's one of my quadruplets So I have a set of quadruplets, but I also have a set of twins.

Katie Ferraro (16m 35s):

The quadruplets came first. And, the first time I ever did baby-led weaning was with them and I was, I waited until they were seven and a half months of age. So they were born at 34 weeks, which is six weeks premature. So we wait until they're six month adjusted age. The quads weren't sitting up on their own until closer to seven and a half months of age. And even then, when we put them all in the chairs to eat, Henry just put his head down on the table and he didn't wanna participate in eating for almost the first six weeks. And then one day Henry just picked his head up and kind of started eating like the other kids. And he was always a little bit behind them. But the takeaway message here is that multiples will always progress at their own pace. One's always gonna be faster than the other, and that's totally fine. And then when I went on to have my twins, when actually my daughter started eating better than my son, I wasn't worried about him being a few days or weeks behind her because I'd already known from experience that multiples get ready to eat at different stages.

Katie Ferraro (17m 24s):

And so for those of you who are parents of multiples doing baby led weaning, it's also important to remember that if your baby was born prematurely, that we wait until the baby's six month adjusted age before starting solid foods. And so if this is a new concept to you, go back and listen to episode one 19. It's about Premature Babies How to Estimate and Adjust age for starting solids because it's really important that you don't start too early. It's gonna be dangerous for a number of different reasons, including choking risk. And I share a lot of other dangerous reasons in that episode. So Henry, thanks for the heads up that multiple babies are gonna eat at their own pace and sometimes they're just not ready to eat and it's not your job as a parent to force your baby to eat.

Katie Ferraro (18m 4s):

All right, last baby that we gotta really kinda wake up call from was baby JoJo. So baby JoJo, six months of age starting solid foods, six months plus two weeks when we started, actually, she's sitting up on her own. This was the BABY who had six months, was pulling herself up to standing in a crib and also starting to crawl. Okay? That's for those of you that have had Babies, if you remember like milestone wise, that that's pretty early. Okay? And so parents always ask me, Katie, what are your thoughts about straps in the high chair? And personally, I never strap a baby in the high chair early on when we're starting solid foods because the high chair always has that I use, I use the Nomi high chair. It has a protective guard around it that keeps the BABY from falling out of the chair. And why do I need the straps when a baby is new to eating and there's a higher risk of choking because they're just learning how to use different textures.

Katie Ferraro (18m 47s):

I don't wanna be fumbling with the straps on a five point harness that I unnecessarily strap the BABY in, right? Because a six or seven month old baby, they're not going anywhere. They're not crawling, they're not climbing. For the most part, baby jojo, when we put her in the Nomi high chair and put her feet resting flat on the adjustable foot plate of that high chair, she started popping up and popping up and I was like, This baby could potentially fall out of this high chair. I'm going to put the straps on this baby. Now, the high chair manufacturers tell you, you should always put the straps on and you know, you do you. But early on in feeding, I'm not putting the straps on because I wanna be able to extract that baby very quickly from the high chair, except in the case of certain Babies, they will surprise you and some of them will be pulling up to standing and crawling and potentially be a flight risk early on in feeding.

Katie Ferraro (19m 32s):

That's very, very unusual. It tends not to be until like eight, nine months of age when the baby is really confident in eating that. I'm like, Oh, they're also trying to climb outta this high chair. I'm gonna start putting the straps on. So the take away message there, you gotta use your mom gut, okay? There's no right or wrong formula prescription for how you get started with solid foods. And just a friendly reminder as I hope you've learned from all 10 of these Babies, that all Babies are different. All right, Thanks so much for listening to the rundown of the 10 Babies. You can grab all the links to everything I talked about at BLW podcast.com/two 70. And if you're just getting ready to start solid foods, we're gonna be hosting a three day BLW Bootcamp. This is a really cool low cost $5 a day Bootcamp training where I'm gonna get you all up to speed on starting solid foods safely.

Katie Ferraro (20m 20s):

If you had to be BLW Bootcamp dot com, you can sign up and you can get started getting ready for setting all the things in order that you need for your baby to get a safe start to solid foods. So BLW Bootcamp dot com, I'll see you there. Thanks for listening. Bye now.