Food, glorious food!

This recommendation of starting you babe on solids at 6 months is all very well and suited petite Miss M just fine but Little Mr M who weighed in a 6 weeks what she did at 6 months just needs a little more than my poor boobs have to give. For the last month he has thought that its entirely acceptable to feed at least 3 hourly, day AND night. I love you darling but enough is enough! So yesterday marked another parenting milestone and we attempted to shovel warm pureed apple into him, Daddy capturing the whole thing on film.
Perhaps you've heard of Baby Led Weaning? It turns the latest recommendations upside down suggesting that babies are ready from 3 months and that by the time they are 6 months they don't need pureed food but instead should be given finger foods pf things the rest of the family are eating. Advocates say it eliminates fussy eating habits. I'm a wee bit too paranoid about choking but I'm keen to try anything that saves time and energy!

http://babyledweaning.blogware.com/

http://www.babycentre.co.uk/baby/startingsolids/babyledweaning/

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WV0Xtdhhc0c

An interesting fact: Its only since 2003 that WHO has recommended starting solids at 6 months. No wonder all our mothers and grandmothers have been giving us the "You're babying that baby" look while we indulge them with breast milk only until they're 6 months old.

"The moment a child is born, the mother is also born. She never existed before. The woman existed, but the mother, never. A mother is something absolutely new. "~Rajneesh

Numero Uno

Welcome to the first post of Free Range Parenting. Here you'll find tales of my parenting adventures, experiments, triumphs and failures.
The term 'free range' kids appeared in our household as an alternative to my darling hubby referring to our beautiful, well mannered, always clean and sweet smelling and oh so compliant cherubs as....feral! Like all new parents we went into this parenting lark completely blind but we are VEry eager to learn and I'll be sharing my findings with you!
Currently our household consists or Miss M, who at 2 1/2 starts every sentence with a W word, and Master L who at 5 months just started rolling...and shouting.
Our children are very fortunate in that they have lots of grandparents in their lives all of whom enjoy taking care of them. So in a way we're raising them together, great for the babes but sometimes hard for me, as their mother, to hand them over. I'm sure I'll have a lot to say about that here.

I also have a 'middle child'...my business, a modern cloth nappy company called Nudey!Rudey! It takes quite a bit of juggling to meet the needs of ALL my children (including my mother in law's youngest)

"When you are a mother, you are never really alone in your thoughts. A mother always has to think twice, once for herself and once for her child. " ~Sophia Loren, Women and Beauty