Toddler Eating

Baby Led Weaning is messy! Linnaeus covered in yams

I consider myself pretty lucky that I got a couple of kids who took to eating solid food really well & weren't too picky to start with. Baby Led Weaning was great fun & I kind of miss watching my wee ones awkwardly picking up chunks of veggies & smooshing them into their little mouths. I mean, at four & a half & one & a half they both still get food on their faces & clothes every meal & spill drinks all over the table fairly regularly. However, now it's not so much about how they eat, but what or if.

Linnaeus would eat pretty much anything but leafy foods as a baby & toddler. I'm going to assume that it was because he had trouble grinding it up, being new to molars & all. He had some issues with things like apple skins to start with, but I soon quit peeling everything & he figured it out. He's recently started eating salads, though the lettuce has to be accompanied by a lot of other stuff for him to eat it. Works for me, since I love salads full of nuts, fruit, seeds, eggs, bacon, cheese, veggies, croutons, & whatever else I think to throw in.

Baby Bronte's first Cheerios

Bronte was pretty adventurous to start with too, but has recently gone off bread type foods. She will eat whatever is on it, but leave most of the bread. She seems to see toast, a bun, a bagel, or a tortilla as more of a plate than a food item.

Bronte is also very anti fruit skin. The only way she'll eat apple is having bites of mine, off the core, after I've already eaten the skin. If I hand her a peeled slice or chunk of apple, she still won't eat it. Has to be mine.

Temperature is another thing. Bronte will accept a wider range here than Linnaeus--she loves peas straight out of the freezer, never complains at ice cream or smoothies. Linnaeus, on the other hand, won't tolerate anything much hotter than lukewarm & it took him a good year to stop making faces at how cold ice cream was.

The last thing I find weird about their eating habits is that they seem to alternate in terms of quantity. Some days, Bronte will eat twice as much as her brother. Other days he will eat more than I do & she'll have just a few bites & exclaim, "I done!"

Thankfully the pickiness isn't near the point where I worry about them getting scurvy or something. Overall their diet is fairly balanced, so I'm not going to get stressed out about it. I heard some great advice years ago: when it comes to toddler nutrition, focus on the big picture. Aim for a balance of healthy foods over a week, don't worry about getting in all the food groups (or whatever) at every single meal.

You tell me--did your kids go through an only goldfish crackers phase, or refuse to eat any particular type of food for months? Let me know in the comments... 

Follow Spokesmama here too:

Linnaeus 3.8

Baby led weaning for penguins!

I love watching my little boy work things out through play. This past month has been all about food & introducing foods to Brontë. Unsurprisingly, Linnaeus is doing a lot of food-related play. One day, he took his wooden shape sorter box & put Brontë's penguin stuffie into it, feet out the holes in the front like Brontë's high chair, rested a puzzle box lid on top as a tray & proceeded to feed the penguin kale, a mushroom, half an orange, half a cucumber & an ice cream cone.

Though he's apparently excited to feed his penguin, Linnaeus' appetite is inconsistent these days. Sometimes he'll eat more oatmeal for breakfast than me (like half a litre of the stuff!) or the other night he ate about 15 pieces of sushi. He often doesn't eat much of his lunch at preschool & maybe half the time he turns up his nose at most of dinner. It's never one particular food that he doesn't like, at least, it just seems to be a varying appetite.

One thing I've been enjoying lately is the terms he's been coining for things, as well as some funny new mispronunciations he's now using, along the non-linear path of language development. A few that come to mind are umpartments, honkted house, bwefixt, ding dong house, flower trees. Can you guess what they all mean?

This past month hasn't been all fun & games, of course. The most challenging thing has been Linnaeus' bad behaviour on the playground, specifically pushing & hitting other kids. I decided to do something similar to what they've been doing at preschool when he pushes someone in a potentially dangerous situation like at the top of the stairs. If he does it a the park, we immediately go home. I've had to round him up & leave three times now. I've been reminding him before & during the outings what will happen, phrasing it as his choice: be gentle with the other kids & he can stay at the park; hit or push & we go home. He talks about not wanting to push the other kids & I think it's starting to sink in that he shouldn't do it.

That about sums up the month. I'll leave you with a quick video demonstrating his budding acting skills:

Follow Spokesmama here too:

Childhood Ain't What It Used To Be

This was our one day of winter in 2014.

When I read the topic for this week's Listicles--Things That Aren't the Same--on NorthwestMommy.com, I immediately thought of childhood. Lots of good things are the same between my childhood & my children's: being read lots of books, having a garden in the back yard & learning where food comes from, having two parents & an extended family they see fairly often, wearing cloth diapers.

However, even though they're both so little, but there are already so many things I've noticed that are different. Some are big & some are small. Some are only difference between me & them, but some are most likely different for you & your children too.

Here are the first ten that came to mind:

1. Cycling as transportation. I biked a lot as a kid, but it was a recreational pastime, not really transportation. My parents rarely biked at all--I'm not sure my dad even had one as an adult.
2. YouTube is our TV. We got rid of our TV when Linnaeus was a year old, right around the time when things switched from analog to digital. Rather than buy a new TV or a digital box for our hand-me-down TV we just ditched it. I don't miss it, because if I want to watch something, I can get pretty much any TV series online. I started subscribing to a lot of different YouTube channels a few years back, so that's what I watch more than TV series anyway.
3. Information on demand. Related to #2, my kids will grow up being able to get the answer to any trivia question within a minute or two. When I want to explain something, I can pull up a video online that shows it within moments. eBooks can be bought, downloaded for free or borrowed from the library in minutes. When I was a kid, real books were the only books. Encyclopedias & librarians were the only way to get the answer to some of the odd questions that come up during childhood.
4. Urban life. I grew up in the suburban areas of various small towns around BC until my teens, when we moved to a quiet suburb of North Vancouver. My kids will grow up in the city, with its at-times-heavy traffic, ethnic diversity, cafes, restaurants, recreation & community centres, & cultural amenities & events right at our doorstep.
5. Baby Led Weaning. My mom did what most people still do when introducing babies to solid food: mush. We're giving our kids actual solid food like steamed broccoli or carrots, roasted yams, pears, banana, etc. It is not only easier (no blending food, no shopping for expensive little jars of puree, no spoon feeding while my dinner gets cold) but it's more fun to watch a six-month-old explore food. If you're about to start giving solids to your child, I highly recommend you look into Baby Led Weaning.
6. Breastfeeding. Like most North American mothers of the 1970s, our moms were more likely to breastfeed than their parents, but a lot less likely than my generation. No shame, no blame--I turned out fine on formula after my mom was unsuccessful at getting breastfeeding to work. But my two kids are breastfed, Linnaeus until he was nearly two & a half, & we'll see when Bronte decides to wean.
7. Living car-free. I spent a good chunk of my little life in cars, driving from one part of town to another, or one side of the province to another. My kids ride in carshare vehicles around once a month. Linnaeus doesn't really understand the concept of car ownership--he used to just think that we could take any car that was parked in front of our house because we'd often use different vehicles in the car coop. Now he knows to look for the Modo logo on the door.
8. Snow-free winters. I don't know if I can blame global warming for this, as I lived the first 11 years of my life in a different climate zone that actually had what most Canadians would consider a winter. Hallowe'en costumes had to be big enough to accomodate snowsuits under them. I grew up making snowmen, snow forts cross country skiing in my back yard & crazy carpeting home from school. Here in Vancouver, there's so little of the stuff around that we don't bother with snow suits or snow boots, we just layer a lot under the rain gear. I have a child who was afraid to walk on snow the two or three days that he saw it during his second winter.
9. Environtmental friendliness. Is that even a term? Greenpeace had only been around for a few years when I was born & being green just wasn't much of a thing when I was little. My three-year-old son knows more about recycling, composting & organic food than I did in high school.
10. Pretend phones. The first time my son pretended to answer the phone with an object, it was a small, rectangular cracker. Because that's the shape & (relative) size of phones nowadays. When I was a kid, the closest object to a phone would have been a banana.

Now I turn it over to you: what are the major difference between your childhood & that of your kids? Do you share some of the differences in my list, or are those things the same for you? Let me know if the comments below!

Join in the fun yourself--enter the link to your list here (click on the Listicles button to the right), or just browse the many other entries on Northwest Mommy.

Follow Spokesmama here too:

      

Bronte 0.6

My little girl is now a half year old & ready for solid food! Today we'll start with baby-led weaning. I'm very excited--I loved introducing Linnaeus to solid food & I think it'll be even more fun this time around. But enough about that--there will be plenty of posts & photos on the topic in the next few weeks.

B & me at the Vancouver Aquarium

Brontë's adding more & more sounds to her repertoire, her current favourite being a cackling growl that I refer to as the 'rabid dolphin'. I'm not sure, but I think she's copied it from her brother, as he makes a similar noise fairly often. It's kind of ridiculous when the two of them get going.

Another thing that's changed in the past month is sleep. Brontë was occasionally sleeping through the night a month or so ago, but she's started waking once or twice a night now. As long as I get to sleep relatively early, I can survive on broken sleep, but I really hope this is just a short phase & she'll move toward sleeping 7+ hours at a stretch again.

This month's biggest development was mobility--Wee One started rolling & gathered steam quite quickly. By halfway through the month, she'd roll from back to tummy pretty much the instant I put her on the floor. I started giving Brontë more & more playtime on the floor & she used it to spin around like a clock once she got on her tummy, or sometimes rolling from front to back to front again so she could go further. I think she's discovered that it's easier to move around off the blanket on the hardwood, so she tends to roll that way.

I suspect she's going to be crawling & walking earlier than her big brother did...

Follow Spokesmama here too:

What I'd do differently next time

After reading this post on Babble about things the writer would do differently with a second child, I started thinking about what my list might look like. I have to say, I thought about a lot of things carefully before doing them. I think this was because of a couple of things: having two years between trying to conceive, losing our first baby & Sprout's birth probably gave me more time to think about how I wanted to parent. Being older in the first place (nearly 35 when Sprout was born) probably helped too.

Baby bathtub was useful... like, three times.

However, there are still a few things I think I'll do differently this time around. Here's my list so far. Please don't hold me to it in future! ;)

1. Buy lots of gear. We tried to restrain ourselves & got a lot of loans/hand-me-downs, but this time we just don't need much of anything. Also, despite avoiding a lot of gadgets, we still ended up with quite a few things that were unnecessary.
2. Try to toilet train because of other factors than the child's readiness. I thought Sprout was almost there back in February, but the main reasons I was trying to train him is that he was going to daycare & he was getting diaper rashes a lot again. (cloth or disposable--it doesn't seem to matter, they cause problems) It didn't work. After a couple months, we backed off & he wasn't ready until about a month before his third birthday. Then he was really ready & it just happened all within a month: daytime control over pee & poo as well as nighttime dryness.
3. Not going back to work for nearly three years. I started to realize after two years of stay-at-home parenting that it was driving me crazy. When I was younger, I never really wanted to be a stay-at-home mom & after a few years of trying it, I can confirm that it's not really my thing. I think staying home after my daughter's birth for a year, maybe 18 months tops will be enough.
4. Worry so much about everything. I like to think I'm a fairly laid-back parent in a lot of ways, but there are still a lot of things I could relax about & hopefully I will with our daughter. I've already relaxed about what I'm eating & drinking during my pregnancy. Last time around I never had a drop of alcohol, would obsess over every ingredient in herbal teas & I never ate anything that was on the no-no list (deli meats, soft cheeses, hot dogs, etc). I'm still avoiding all these things, but I know that the amount of active ingredients in herbal tisanes is very unlikely to have any effect on my fetus, as is a sip or two of beer.

Baby Led Weaning in action

These are some things that I think worked well, so I want to do them just the same:

1. Baby Led Weaning. This was so much fun & easier than making purees. The book promised a child who is an 'adventurous eater' & Sprout has truly become that. We can feed him pretty much anything & he really loves a lot of healthy foods.
2. Cloth diapering. It is more work than using disposables, but not much. I feel proud that we only contributed a few garbage bins full of disposables to the landfill, rather than the house-sized pile it would have been if we hadn't used cloth. We have the laundry machines in our house & I have the time to wash the diapers, so it just makes sense for us to do it again. Also: with two kids in diapers for five to six years total, using mainly the same set of diapers, I estimate we'll save several thousand dollars.
3. Putting as much effort into breastfeeding as possible. This time around, if I have low supply issues again, I'm not sure I'll be able to do all the pumping, appointments, gear washing/sterilizing, etc that I did last time around. I'm trying to do as much research as I can & get myself prepared with supplements & a plan to get things started off as well as possible from day one.
4. The birth. I guess getting to the hospital a wee bit earlier would be a good idea (I was fighting the urge to push before we even got in the car) but otherwise, BC Women's nurses & my midwife gave us great care & I'd be really happy to have a repeat of the short, drug-free birth that I had with Sprout. I know I haven't got a lot of control over how it all goes, but I'll keep my fingers crossed!

How about you? If you have two or more kids, what did you decide to do (or end up doing) differently with subsequent children? Got any advice for us?

Follow Spokesmama here too:

10 Things You DON'T Need to Buy For Your Baby

Not only was Baby Led Weaning easy, it was FUN!

This week's Listicles topic was '10 Dumbest Purchases', which reminded me of all the things I thought I'd need for Sprout before he was born. The marketing gets pretty intense & unless you've got some practical advice from someone else who's been there, it's hard not to end up with a mountain of unnecessary baby gear. So I thought I'd spin the 10 Dumbest Purchases into 10 Things You DON'T Need To Buy For Your Baby. 

Some of the items are things we bought & didn't need, some we avoided buying due to good advice (generally from my sister--thanks, Wem!). Some of the things we were given as gifts or loaned--we really appreciate the thought behind it! Some of my list is also just things that made me say, "What the..?!?" when I saw them advertised. One further caveat--this list is obviously just my opinion & not meant as judgment of your shopping habits. You may have bought, used & loved many of these things & if they worked for you, that's fabulous! There's no one-size-fits-all baby gear list, of course.

1. Shoes for newborns. They can't walk, sit or even roll over yet. Why in the world would you try to keep shoes on their feet?
2. Jeans for newborns. Unless they are super-stretchy jegging-style jeans, I doubt having a thick denim waistband under a baby's back is all that comfortable. Plus, considering the frequency of diaper blowouts that happen at this stage, the jeans are likely to be on for about five minutes before being tossed in the laundry pile.
3. Bumbo or Jolly Jumper. It's really cute to see babies propped up in these long before they can sit or stand on their own. However, pushing babies into upright postures before they've developed the strength & coordination to do it on their own doesn't seem like a good idea. Also, they're kind of expensive.
4. Food mill or Baby Bullet. I had the former on my baby shower registry & by the time Sprout got to six months old, I'd discovered Baby Led Weaning, which involves absolutely no purees. Most babies are perfectly able to pick up chunks of steamed veggie or fruit or bread & stuff it in their mouth, then gum it & actually swallow some at six months. Sprout fed himself from day one, so we didn't need any of those special long-handled spoons, either.
5. Baby bathtub. We were loaned one of these & used it about three times. I found it a lot easier just to use the sink or the bathtub or just have Sprout in the bath with me.
6. Baby perfume. This one totally baffled me. Why in the world would you need to spray a baby with artificial scent?!? Babies naturally smell awesome already!
7. Padded car seat head support. We were loaned one of these too & the thing was too low for Sprout, so we just used rolled up blankets instead. Cheaper, much easier to customize & a the time that he needed it, he couldn't really move enough to dislodge them anyway.
8. Scratch mittens. I bought some of these in one of my prenatal mini shopping sprees. We used them a few times but Sprout got them off every time. Socks stay on better if needed--I didn't find Sprout scratched himself all that much anyway.
9. A big expensive high chair. My sister suggested we get a Fisher Price Healthy Care Booster Seat, which is a portable seat & tray that straps to practically any chair. It was under $40 & is adjustable enough to use for years. No cumbersome wide-legged high chair taking up a quarter of our kitchen--it's just strapped to one of our four kitchen chairs. We've also used it as restaurants & when travelling.
10. A change table. Considering how long you really use a change table--maybe two years, max, if you have a compliant child that will lie down for diaper changes?--it doesn't seem worth it to invest in one. With a relatively small bedroom for Sprout, we just didn't have room for it either. We just got him a low, wide dresser & put a change pad on top of it.

Did you buy or receive anything for your child that seemed like a good idea, but ended up collecting dust? Can you think of anything to add to my list?



Linking up with NorthwestMommy's weekly Listicles! 
Click on the button to the left & visit some of the other blogs participating this week.








Like what you see here? Subscribe to The Sprog & don't miss another post!

Sleep & Weaning

Gradually over the past few months, Sprout has stopped falling asleep while nursing. It used to be the fail proof way to get him down, but these days, unless he's really exhausted, it calms but doesn't knock him out. For a while this meant putting him in his crib awake, where he would alternate playing, babbling & crying for up to two hours. We'd take turns going in to calm him down several times before he finally succumbed to sleep.

Bit by bit the time needed to get Sprout to sleep has decreased. Most nights lately he has been wide awake when I lay him in his crib, but he he's gone to sleep in about 15 minutes with hardly a peep & no crying. Thankfully, his naps have evolved in a similar way, though it usually takes a little longer for him to fall asleep during the day than at night.

Linnaeus 18.3

Sprout got a Lorax stuffie at the movie
preview on Sunday

This past week hasn't been too eventful in Sprogland. We spent a lot of the last weekend in North Vancouver for a baby shower, a house party & a movie preview. Though we planned to alternate taking Sprout out of the theatre to have breaks during the movie, he sat through the entire thing. This kid's attention span never ceases to amaze me. Monday through Thursday Sprout spent most of each day with Papa while I was at school, going out to the park & the baby gym once in a while.

Mmm... Feesh!
We went out for Japanese food one night this week & Sprout tried some tuna nigiri as well as some chopped scallop with roe. It's the first time he's had raw fish & he seemed to like it. He also ate quite a few California rolls & yam tempura maki. I'm glad we can take him to pretty much any kind of restaurant & he'll eat whatever we're eating. This is exactly what I hoped the Baby Led Weaning would result in: a baby who's got a pretty adventurous palate.

Chatty Sprout gets a needle
Thursday we took the little guy to Ravensong Community Health Clinic for his 18-month immunizations. This time was the easiest yet. He got slightly upset at the weighing & measuring (he's a bit over 26 lbs, about 33" tall) but when he got his one needle, he didn't react at all. He was a tad wary in the office there & a little shy with the nurse, but no crying. When she went through the checklist of developmental milestones, like self-feeding, drinking from a cup, walking, etc, everything was normal. Then she asked if he had at least 10-15 words. I said I'd stopped counting a month before at over 100, estimating his current vocabulary to be around 150. She was amazed & she'd never heard of a child his age with such a vocabulary.

I'm very proud of his language skills, but I can't really claim much responsibility. Both Oliver & I are very language-oriented adults--interested in writing, avid readers, studied languages & literature at university--& according to our parents, we started talking fairly early, so I think maybe there's a genetic component there. Also, Sprout's temperament is such that he likes to sit & pay attention to things for a while, so reading is one of his favourite things to do, which has probably encouraged his vocabulary. I think the majority of his words are from his books.

Playtime favourite
This week Sprout hasn't had any obvious favourite toys other than books. He did spend quite a bit of time pushing his swiffer through the house, however. I took a section out of the handle to make it baby-sized, since we don't really use the thing. Sprout loves it, categorizing it--along with brooms, shovels, crochet hooks, ice scrapers, etc--as a stick, which he pronounces, dik. It still makes me giggle to see him toddling around the house repeating, dik! dik! dik! I wonder how long it's going to be before he starts pronouncing consonant clusters properly?

Sleep: you win some, you lose some
Our efforts to get Sprout napping in his crib without a fuss are paying off & he's going to sleep easier these days. His nap time still varies quite a bit from day to day, going down anywhere from 1pm to 4pm, sleeping for two or occasionally three hours. His bedtime is still  a bit later than I want--10ish--so I end up staying awake later that I should because I want a few hours to myself after he's asleep. Getting him to sleep at a regular time & keeping it from drifting later has been one of the most challenging things, I find. If he goes to bed a bit late one day, then he sleeps late, then naps later & then isn't tired until at least as late as the previous night. One late bedtime can have a ripple effect on the whole week, unfortunately.

There was one night of crying & thrashing at around 2am, so none of us got a proper sleep. Our usual solution with late-night wakings is to bring him to bed with us. I'll nurse him back to sleep while dozing a little. This time he couldn't be comforted by the 'magical' boob & seemed quite uncomfortable, so we resorted to Tylenol & he went back to sleep shortly. I'm guessing it was either bad gas or his two-year-old molars coming early. (A few days before we see any new teeth come through the gums, he usually has one or two rough nights. I think this might be the stage where they're breaking through the bone. ) It would be nice if he finished getting his full set of baby teeth soon. Then we'd get a few years' reprieve from teething issues.

Food-iversary

Today is the anniversary of Sprout starting to eat solid food. Just like when I think of every other milestone, the time seems to have whipped past. After rejecting his high chair the first time we offered him solid food, probably because we hadn't put him in it ever before, Sprout started chowing down on his steamed broccoli florets when on Mama's lap. He was a lot less adept with the mango spears--probably too slippery.

Since that first day a year ago he's eaten so many things. Nowadays--barring the rare toddler pickyness episode--will eat whatever we're having. With the exceptions of citrus fruit & anything leafy, that is. He loves rice & beans with salsa, curry, sushi rolls, samosas, anything garlicky. One of the reasons we tried introducing solids via the Baby Led Weaning method was that it is supposed to make for a more adventurous eater--seems it was a success for us.

What I've learned about feeding Sprout in the past year:

• Put baby in the high chair a few times at dinner before you ever feed them anything. Getting them used to the seat seems to help them focus on the food later.
• Baby Led Weaning is way less work than spoon feeding purees, even if you don't make them yourself, you still have to shop for them.
• Babies have very sensitive taste buds but that doesn't mean they won't like spicy foods! 
• It was tempting to just throw all kinds of food at Sprout, rather than trying things one at a time & keeping track, but when he had horrible diaper rashes due to his diet, it was tricky to isolate what caused it. (watch for burn-like bum rashes the day after you've fed acidic foods like kiwi, raspberry, tomato--I know quite a few kids who seemed to react to those, at least for the first year or so)
• Special baby or toddler snacks are usually really low on food value--Mum Mums in particular are just sugar & starch, basically. Plus they're super expensive by weight. Oh, & they stick to EVERYTHING like wallpaper paste.
• Look in the 'adult food' aisles of the supermarket for portable snacks. (or better yet, make your own!) Just as convenient as the prepackaged toddler cereal bars or fruit snacks are Larabars, which are very minimally processed & has no unpronounceable ingredients.
• Every kid learns to do things at their own speed. For example, one suggestion in the Baby Led Weaning book was to provide 'dippers' of bread or fruit so baby can eat yogurt, etc on their own. We tried this nearly a year ago, I think, but Sprout only really got into dipping last week. His best friend, on the other hand, who's just a month older, has been dipping for nearly a year.
• No matter how you feed your baby, pieces of food or purees, at some point they are going to gag. It's a good idea to learn the difference between gagging & choking before you start solids. Gagging is a natural reflex that all babies have which helps them move food forward & away from their throat to prevent choking. (It's a safety mechanism & it's the reason why Baby Led Weaning works--the gag reflex is quite far forward in the mouth in six-month-olds, so they are actually less likely to choke on chunks of food than if you wait until nine months to introduce finger foods.) It looks scary, but is painless & not upsetting to babies (unless you freak out about it, which will scare them). Don't whip them out of the highchair & start the baby version of the Heimlich manoeuvre. Choking, I don't need to tell you, is dangerous, but thankfully rare.
• If your baby or toddler is refusing a food, it may not be the taste but the size, shape, texture or temperature that s/he doesn't like. For example, Sprout's gone through stages where he prefers apples whole, or sliced thinly, or in quarters or in little cubes. He also hated anything cold at first & still isn't a huge fan of ice cream or popsicles.

Hope some of this is helpful to some of you out there! Please let me know if you have any Baby-Led Weaning questions. I'm not an expert, but I learned a lot going through it with Sprout.

I put together a slide show of some of Sprout's 'culinary adventures' over the past year on YouTube. Enjoy!

Gear: The Baby-Led Weaning Cookbook

What is it?
The Baby-Led Weaning Cookbook, but Gill Rapely & Tracey Murkitt.
How does it work?
I'm sure you know how a cook book works, so I'll explain what the title means. Baby-led weaning is a way of introducing your child to solid food without purees. At about six months, babies are able to pick up food & feed themselves--there's no need to blend everything into mush & spoon feed them. In fact, starting with finger foods (chunks of steamed veggies, fingers of toast, etc) right away at six months is actually safer than waiting. Because their gag reflex is so far forward at that age, babies will push food out of their mouths before it gets anywhere near their throat if it's too big to swallow easily. By the time the gag reflex has moved further back, they've learned to manage food with their teeth & tongue, making them less likely to choke. 
Besides the safety issues, baby-led weaning is also so much easier: no pureeing, no spoon-feeding while you try no power struggles &  trying to get 'the airplane in the hangar'. The family can eat the same thing (with the usual exceptions like honey, nuts, etc for the first year) at the same time. Children introduced to solid foods this way are often more adventurous with food & less likely to be picky eaters.

Why is it good?

The book's full of information on baby-led weaning & 130 great, simple, nutritious recipes for the first few months (years?) of eating with baby. The food isn't baby food, it's food that everyone will like & babies can easily eat too.

How much does it cost?

Free if you borrow it from the library. $23 at Chapters.

Where can you get it?

The Vancouver Public Library has 14 copies. Amazon & Chapters sell it online.

Baby likes poutine

"Bucket bib"  from Superstore: $5.

Kidopotamus placemat: $15.

Seeing your toddler try to drink the gravy out of the poutine bowl: priceless.

Good to the last drop...