Mess Becomes Her: The Chaos of Introducing Solid Foods

The floor is a mess! The dog is having a great time! And I'm not sure how much the baby is actually eating.

After being gestated for 14-15 months, a baby giraffe will fall Superman-style from its mother's birth canal, head and hooves first, to the ground six feet below. Within an hour, it will stand and walk on its own.

Piglets can understand the concept of mirrors at six weeks old.

Baby wolves start hunting with the pack at six months old.

According to the latest recommendations, baby humans need to wait until about six months old (give or take) to even be ready to be taught how to eat adult foods. Those foods must be mashed, pureed, or given in pieces too large to get stuck in a baby's windpipe, because the mechanisms that allow us to swallow are located in the same general area as the mechanism that enables us to breathe, which means that eating and choking often go hand-in-hand.

We are a poorly-designed species.

In my house, we've started on the long, messy journey that is "introducing solids" recently, and so far it seems like the floor and the dog are getting a lot more nourishment from the process than the baby.

As with many parenting decisions, there are several schools of extremely shouty thought out there about the correct way to go about feeding an infant foods beyond breast milk or formula.

When we set out to start Juniper on solids, I did some looking into what philosophies were out there and was drawn by the confidence conveyed by proponents of something known as "Baby-Led Weaning." I hate to admit it, but I'm a sucker for confidence in the parenting advice universe because mine is so shaky. As a first-time parent, the way I feel about myself as a mother at any given time can range from "I have no idea what the fuck I'm doing" to "I'm 90% sure I am doing the right thing and 10% concerned that I am doing the opposite of the right thing." (Now would be a great time for a smooth-talking charlatan to convince me to join a cult.)

So: Baby-Led Weaning, or "BLW" for short, is an approach to feeding little ones that aims to follow the baby's lead in introducing solid foods rather than having parents dictate the schedule. Parents look for cues that their baby is ready to eat, and then rather than doing the old Here Comes The Airplane pureed prunes routine, the baby explores the same foods and textures the rest of the family is eating and feeds themself when they're ready.

Once I got past the fact that the abbreviation "BLW" looks like a Pornhub category, this philosophy appealed to me. First of all, I'm not sure if it's that I'm lazy, exhausted, or some combination of the two, but the idea of coercing an already-headstrong infant into enjoying pureed parsnips one teardrop-sized spoonful at a time sounded like whatever the opposite of a Zen Garden is. Theoretically BLW takes less work, because the baby does the work (all I would have to do as a parent is make sure the food they were served was prepared in a way that was safe for them!) Theoretically, BLW is less expensive, because it requires no separate meal preparation for baby.

BLW adherents also say that feeding the baby what the rest of the family is eating and allowing them to explore flavors and textures safely on their own schedule was a good way to head off some picky eating and the complications that come with that. If there's anything at all I can do that will lessen the chances that six years from now, my child will refuse to eat anything but buttered noodles and nuggets, I'll do it.

So it was settled. We'd start by simply "reading our baby's cues" and then things would be easy-peasy!

Folks, nothing is ever easy, nor is it peasy.

First of all, there's a bit of trial and error when it comes to gauging appropriate cues. One of the first things we tried to serve Juniper was a piece of mango cut into roughly the size and shape of a finger, per Solid Starts' recommendation. Pieces of fruits and vegetables cut to that size aren't meant to be chewed and swallowed by the baby; they're meant to be a way for the baby to work on their hand eye coordination and explore the taste and texture while familiarizing themselves with the inside of their own mouth (this is called "mouth mapping").

But Juniper somehow used her razor sharp gums to bite a chunk off, and then spent ten minutes sucking on said chunk of mango like it was a piece of candy, and then realized with alarm that she didn't know how to spit it out, and then she started crying, and then I had to use my finger to take the mango out of her mouth because I didn't want her to inhale the mango chunk, which the BLW literature said I was not supposed to do, but I did anyway because I did not have the stomach to do what the BLW literature told me I was supposed to do, which was to pretend that I was spitting food out so that she'd try to imitate me. It seemed like she was in distress, which meant that I was in distress. The vibes were not chill.

Trial and error. Fine. That was an error.

We had better luck introducing peanut butter, which Juniper loved so much that she turned her face and neck into a peanut butter painting, and then smeared it all over her high chair. It took longer to clean up her masterpiece than it had for her peanut butter exploration.

The baby enjoyed crinkle-cut roasted sweet potatoes, but not as much as she enjoyed throwing them on the ground for the dog to eat them.

Same goes for cantaloupe. Did you know that dogs will eat cantaloupe? That's something I learned recently in the food-throwing laboratory also known as my dining room.

She was given a cut piece of plain chicken to gnaw on, which she found interesting until I looked away for a second and the dog ate it out of her hand and she started crying.

And then we came up against the impracticality of the suggestion to "just serve her what we eat!" Like "go to therapy" or "compost your leftovers," that's easier said than done. I couldn't figure out how to safely serve a baby Charlie Bird's Farro Salad. Nor could we figure out how to feed her baby-safe Filipino-style Coconut Beef over rice. We gave her a piece of pizza crust to gnaw on, but that got soggy with spit and threatened to meet the same fate as the mango.

She seemed to enjoy a taste of scrambled egg with kimchee, until two days later when she triumphantly ate half a scrambled egg under our supervision only to break out into hives minutes later (her pediatrician said that's a common reaction and she'll probably grow out of it, but to avoid eggs for the next few months).

After two weeks of attempted "baby eats what we eat" adherence to Baby Led Weaning, most of what she was served was ending up in her hair, in her chair, in the dog's mouth, or on the floor, and I was starting to think that maybe it was time to suck it up and try some good old fashioned purees and her own little spoon. At least I'd seen that done before.

And so that's what we did. She's now eating some of what we eat, but mostly snacking on less exotic-for-a-baby fare like plain pureed apples, zucchini, and peaches. She's using her own spoon and feeding herself, which means she's dropping most of it on her chair and the floor and smearing it in her hair, which means I'm spending more time than I ever imagined I would wielding a washcloth. If this is how we get her to be an independent eater more quickly, I'll accept the temporary inconvenience.

Her transition to solids has not meant that I am now any more free from the tether of breastfeeding, either; instead it means that I spend at least twice the amount of time on food. Babies take a long time to eat. Eventually, solids will supplant liquids, but until then I'm in a near-constant state of feeding the baby, watching the baby "explore" food by throwing it, cleaning up after the baby, or getting the baby to sleep over her objections.

The brightest bright spot in this is that, unlike over-confident parenting advice that doesn't fully pan out in every particular situation, taking pictures of my daughter grinning with pureed squash covering her entire face is something that doesn't get old.

Image via Shutterstock