Gill Rapley (1s):

There was something about it that enabled them to do things that they weren't otherwise being enabled to do. And it had ramifications beyond the feeding and the eating, but it was helping their motor skills and their hand eye coordination and so on.

Katie Ferraro (13s):

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. Hello, and welcome back. I am so excited for today's interview with two of Baby-Led Weaning's great leaders, Gill Rapley and Jill Rabin. So Gill Rapley is the pioneer and founding philosopher of the Baby-Led Weaning movement.

Katie Ferraro (54s):

She's also co author of the original Baby-Led Weaning book. And Jill Rabin is a speech language pathologist and feeding therapist. Jill Rabin created the Adapted Baby-Led Weaning approach for children with feeding difficulties. So Jill Rabin is located in the United States. Gill Rapley is in the United Kingdom, both Gill and Jill have bed on the podcast a number of times in the past talking about their respective areas of expertise, but they teamed up together to co-write a brand new book about ABLW. And again, that's the Adapted Baby-Led Weaning approach that Jill Rabin created based on the philosophies and the work of Gill Rapley. So the ABLW approach is for children with feeding difficulties.

Katie Ferraro (1m 34s):

We'll talk a little bit about the intended audience, but I wanted to chat with Gill and Jill about the book writing process, right? Two authors, very busy schedules on opposite sides of the Atlantic ocean, a pretty big undertaking to combine their expert work on Baby-Led Weaning, and then put it into a book which is going to be, and it is actually out now a very valuable resource for parents and feeding therapists and other credential feeding experts. And I think it is so important that parents and caregivers are getting their feeding information about how to do Baby-Led Weaning and infant feeding, nutrition and development, and all of the different nuances about how we transitioned to solid foods, its got to be coming from credentialed feeding experts, and there's so much misinformation out there these days, especially on social media, especially about Baby-Led Weaning that I really wanted to highlight here on the podcast, the whole book writing experience so that you guys can see what goes into publishing a book about Baby-Led Weaning and how dramatically that differs from churning out content for social media.

Katie Ferraro (2m 38s):

So with no further ado, I want to bring on Gill Rapley and Jill Rabin talking a little bit about the process of writing a book about Baby-Led Weaning.

Gill Rapley (2m 50s):

Oh, it's lovely to be back, Katie. Thanks for having us.

Jill Rabin (2m 53s):

We're very excited to do this today.

Katie Ferraro (2m 55s):

All right. You guys have a book that you co-wrote, that will be published by the time this episode airs. Can you tell me what the book is about and who did you write it for?

Jill Rabin (3m 3s):

So this is Jill Rabin and this book is about the Adapted Baby-Led Weaning approach follows the same principles as regular Baby-Led Weaning. And this book is for parents, grandparents, any extended family member, therapists, anyone seeking help with transitioning a baby with feeding challenges to solid food feedings. It could be a baby with a diagnosis like Down syndrome. It could be a picky eater. It could be someone with a complicated medical history, like being a preterm infant. And I've also found this approach to be very effective with children who have aversion to foods, such as babies who were overfed, tube fed, maybe a little one who had a choking incident or any type of complicated medical history.

Gill Rapley (3m 42s):

Well, we've been working on this book for a year, just over now. We finished it. We were kind of June till June, really? And we've had a lot of fun, but it's been a lot of hard work. We've gotten to know each other really well. And we're very excited that it's now available.

Katie Ferraro (3m 56s):

Well, I am excited to learn more about the book writing process, but for Jill Rabin, for our audience who might not be familiar with the Adapted Baby-Led Weaning approach, who does this work for? What sort of families do you work with?

Jill Rabin (4m 9s):

So Adapted Baby-Led Weaning is an approach that I developed in 2010, after watching a DVD of Gill's approach, it was a 23 minute DVD and it changed my life. I saw this and I could not believe what these babies were doing and the population that I work with that has feeding challenges. So I thought this is amazing. How could I utilize this with my population? What can I do to allow kids who have Motoric challenges or difficulty self-feeding and how could I get them to do this approach? So Adapted Baby-Led Weaning follows the same principles of regular Baby-Led Weaning. But this approach is for babies who might have Motoric or feeding challenges that are going to impact their ability to self-feed.

Jill Rabin (4m 51s):

And with this approach, we might need to use bridge devices, such as a silicone feeder. We might need to do what we call responsive facilitation, where we help babies bring a silicone feeder to their mouth. We always do it responsibly. We never put something in the baby's mouth without the baby giving us permission like Marsha Dunn Klein's approach. And we use those bridge devices until the baby can self feed using their hands and fingers. And with this approach, sometimes we have to start introducing solids later than six months, because we are looking at overall gross motor foundational skills and their readiness. So sometimes we might start at seven or eight months and we use different sizes, shapes, and textures of foods to work on skill.

Jill Rabin (5m 36s):

So we might use strips to work on jaw strength, or side to side tongue movement or chewing. So everything we do, there's a method to the madness and what we sometimes need to do for babies who have more complex oral motor or feeding issues we might need to utilize what's called a sensory motor approach. This is approach created by Lori Overland, who's a speech pathologist in Connecticut, and she wrote a book with Robin Walsh and this sensory motor approach uses different oral motor tools and food to help babies develop skills and to become safe and efficient eaters. So really again, ABLW follows all the principles of regular BLW. We just need to make adaptations for babies who are struggling or having any type of feeding challenge.

Katie Ferraro (6m 19s):

And for Gill Rapley, I was just curious about the collaboration process. Is this your first time working with Jill Rabin? I know you're familiar with her work with the Adapted Baby-Led Weaning approach for a while now, but what was it that inspired you to collaborate, bringing your own perspectives to this project?

Gill Rapley (6m 35s):

I think I have known Jill probably since soon after she saw that DVD of mine, she would've got in touch with me. And so she was sporadically emailing me and sending me with the parents' permission, photos and videos showing me the work she was doing. And I was just thinking for a long time: okay, well, this is great. I kind of always knew all babies could do it. The point of baby led is that each baby does it at their own pace and so on. And I think the exciting thing that happens sort of maybe a couple of years ago now, 18 months, was the something she said made me realize that this wasn't just that these babies could do this and they could eat this way, but that actually this approach could be therapeutic for them, that there was, there was something about it that enabled them to do things that they weren't otherwise being enabled to do.

Gill Rapley (7m 20s):

And it had ramifications beyond the feeding and the eating, but it was helping their motor skills and their hand eye coordination and so on. And I would just suddenly something clicked in my brain. And I said to her, this is amazing. You have to write this up, you have to write about this. This is just, people have to know this. Then there was a very interesting sort of email exchange. We've still never met in the flesh, by the way. It's always been remote by email and so on. And so Jill said something like, yeah, you know what, I need to write this book with somebody else. And it really should be somebody like you, Gill. And then I think I said something like, do you know what, if you can't find anybody like me? Well, you could try me actually. And so that's how it went.

Gill Rapley (8m 0s):

We just started working together and it's been interesting working kind of cross, you know, into different cultures. And so on. We can talk a bit about that in a moment, but I think what's brilliant about working together is that we have different professional backgrounds. So Jill's a speech language pathologist. I'm a health visitor, which doesn't really exist in the state, but it's kind of like a public health nurse a bit, but mainly we're focused on, on parents and babies and young children and their moms and dads. So my expertise, if you like, is in child development, whereas Jill's is much more specific in the whole area of, of feeding and speech and language. And so we, we bring different perspectives and that way you get a really good end result because we challenge each other.

Gill Rapley (8m 46s):

We ask each other questions. I mean, I'm almost qualified as a speech language pathologist now actually I should say, because I've learnt so much, so much this last year, but I think that's the beauty of having two people who are competent and trained in their own fields, but coming together on something like Baby-Led Weaning. And I think actually that's one of the exciting things about Baby-Led Weaning: it crosses so many boundaries. So dietitians, nutritionists like yourself, Katie, speech language pathologists, pediatricians, occupational therapists. I mean just so many professions that can come together on this because it can speak to all of them.

Katie Ferraro (9m 20s):

And it's so nice to see the collaboration too, like challenging each other in a professional nature. That's something, unfortunately you don't see the behind the scenes when you just get all your feeding information from social media, for example, or different resources. It's nice to hear the back and forth again, bringing your different areas of expertise together.

Jill Rabin (9m 39s):

I learned so much from Gill. I feel like we would take deep dives into subjects to learn more. And we were such BLW nerds. Like we send each other articles back and forth. And I think that it was just a great collaboration. And now even like, I'll talk about something in Adapted Baby-Led Weaning. And I kind of try to, I describe it. And Gill's like, no, you don't need to do that. I get it. I get it. I understand why you're doing that. So I really think she understands it so well now.

Katie Ferraro (10m 0s):

Can we talk a little bit about the whole writing the book process, again, I know we're kind of functioning in an era where the average attention span is down to like six seconds on TikTok and Instagram reels. And here you guys are for a whole year putting together this masterpiece, essentially, especially, I'm just thinking of sometimes in our own context, like for feeding therapists who might otherwise have learned, baby can not do X because of Y diagnosis. And yet you're out there with the visuals in your everyday showing that it's possible. But now you have to put it into a book process. Maybe Jill Rabin, you could answer first, but how was the process of writing a book with two authors on different continents?

Jill Rabin (10m 38s):

Yes. You know, it worked really well. Gill, I couldn't have asked for a better writing partner. She was really the task master. She kept us on schedule. I was working full time during this and it was, I did not get a lot of sleep during that year. And Gill Rapley did not either because she'd be up all night, sometimes fixing things. But what would happen is I would work all day. Gill would do her work during the day. She would send me whatever she had done. And then I would work on it until 12, 1:00 AM in the morning and then I would send it to her. So she'd be ready the next day. And that's how we did it. And it worked really, really well. So, you know, us being on different continents actually really helped because I feel like we were very effective and productive. I think the writing process is-it's hard.

Jill Rabin (11m 19s):

It is so hard to write a book and it was so nice to have someone like Gill, who's done this before, who has the experiences. She understands all the nuances. It was really, really hard to do this. And sometimes I was afraid to put something in writing because I've had so much backlash in the past from therapists saying that what I do is dangerous and shouldn't be done. And I can't believe you're doing this. And Jill really gave me that confidence to say, this is absolutely fine. Like she does not care. She's like, this is what it is. And she really gave me the confidence to put some of these things down in writing. And sometimes when I'd read it, I'd be like, oh boy, I'm going to get it when these therapists read this information. But I feel like she was so helpful to me and making me feel more confident about the information that I was trying to give to people.

Katie Ferraro (12m 3s):

Gill Rapley. Any thoughts on the book writing process from across the ocean?

Gill Rapley (12m 7s):

Yeah. I mean, I know enough now that when I start on the book that's my total focus for however long it takes, really, apart from lulls when the, our editor is doing something to the text, mostly it's just this back and forth between Jill and myself and sure. Late nights. Absolutely because there's a six hour time difference between us. So I'm on the go before she is technically, but luckily I'm a late night person anyways. There was one fortnight where I didn't go to bed before half past two in the morning, every single day. It was crazy, but it's great. The other thing of course, we have to remember, it's not just different continents, but different languages. You know, two countries divided by a common language.

Gill Rapley (12m 47s):

And I had to learn quite a lot of American speak when I wrote my first book with Tracey Murkett. And that was quotes, translated into US English. The editor did that for us, but working with Jill, I kept, she kept having to correct me on my spelling. And my, and I would have sort of phrasiology that just doesn't work in the US and you guys don't get it. And equally, I would say to her what on earth does that mean, and what is pudding for goodness sake? What is pudding? Because we use that word very differently. So it's been an education all around.

Katie Ferraro (13m 18s):

Well, I learned even from working with you, Gill Rapley, we just have a common thing where you say their first name, their last name, their credential, then sometimes for the rest of it, if you're talking about the person you refer by their last name, and I remember you being like, this just feels weird to call me Rapley. I was like, okay, I'm sorry. We'll just call you Gill Rapley or Gill moving forward. But it's just a nuance that you don't even realize you're doing it as part of American English versus British English, et cetera. So I know I am so excited for our field of credentialed feeding experts, especially for our feeding therapists colleagues to have this resource because you alluded to this Jill Rabin, but so often families of children with feeding difficulties, they'll hear misinformation like, oh, your baby, can't learn to self feed, or your baby will never be able to feed themselves. And yet your work with Adapted Baby-Led Weaning is showing that that is not always the case.

Katie Ferraro (14m 2s):

So just curious how you see feeding therapists and feeding experts using this book that you've collaborated on with Gill Rapley in their clinical practice. Question for Jill Rabin.

Jill Rabin (14m 13s):

So I would say that the younger generation of therapists is much more amenable to this approach. People in my age and older are a little bit more resistant to this approach. There's something in the field of speech pathology, where I feel like feeding therapists feel a lot, that they need to control the feeding. And they really do believe that babies have to be spoonfed first. They feel like that's a developmental milestone, and they don't really realize that that was created in the forties. Like spoon-feeding is something that was created by culture. So that's a really hard thing to get older, the older generation to change something that really did help is I, I lectured on this approach with Lori Overland at the American Speech and Hearing Association conference a couple of years ago.

Jill Rabin (14m 54s):

And a lot of her feeding colleagues came to that conference because they respect Lori so much. And I feel like they, they really were much more open to this approach after seeing that Lori endorsed it. So that was very, very helpful. I still do think that there's a lot of resistance by therapists out there because they don't really understand how this approach works. They just know a little tiny bit, you know, we always know a little bit of information can be dangerous. They know a little bit about Baby-Led Weaning, and they don't understand that this is a very systematic approach it's done very safely. And it has unbelievable benefits for babies with feeding challenges, like Gill said, it's just not about eating. There's so many other things that it addresses. So I still think we have a long way to go.

Jill Rabin (15m 34s):

I will tell you that I get so many messages on my Instagram from parents that tell me my speech pathologist and my medical teams that I absolutely can't do this. It's not safe, but I think one of the most satisfying things is if anybody out there follows Able Appetites on Instagram, it is so exciting for me to see so many babies with Down syndrome and children with other issues with development that are doing amazingly well and they're eating real food in these posts. And I think that is a huge change that I'm seeing, but I feel like it's really been perpetuated by parents more than the therapist.

Katie Ferraro (16m 7s):

And we actually had Sabrina Smiley Evans from Able Appetite. She was on an episode 218 talking about Down syndrome, BLW success stories, and a lot of overlap with your work as well. Cause you introduced us Jill Rabin. So thank you. And I'll link to that episode too, for families with Down syndrome, just to see, you know, what is possible. And I like how you mentioned that, you know, it's kind of the younger generation and I would consider myself in the middle of the generations of dietitians where certainly older dietitians have no idea what Baby-Led Weaning is. They're the ones teaching at the college level, in our nutrition throughout the life cycle textbooks still, in the 14th edition, start spoonfeeding at four months of age. Like for real, we're still teaching this? And yet this generation of dietitians who will sometimes follow me, find my work, they'll start doing Baby-Led Weaning after reading Gill Rapley's book, you know, they're kind of combining different resources and then seeing it work with their own babies really inspires them and gives them the confidence to then help as a credentialed feeding expert other families adapt this method.

Katie Ferraro (17m 3s):

Cause with Baby-Led Weaning seeing really is believing. So I know that's kind of, I work primarily with the neuro-typical audience and yet Jill Rabin, you're working with children with feeding challenges and then bringing in, you know, the whole Baby-Led Weaning the history and the philosophy combining that with Gill Rapley's approach, this book is, is really an important resource. Gill Rapley, I'm curious about your thoughts about how you think this book might be used in clinical practice and beyond.

Gill Rapley (17m 27s):

One of the things that excites me about it is for parents to have it in their hands because many, many parents of babies and children who've had feeding issues have come across Baby-Led Weaning, and they kind of instinctively feel that their baby ought to be able to do this and they want to focus and they hope that therapists will focus on what their baby can do, not what they can't do. But just armed with a book about Baby-Led Weaning, they haven't really been able to make the breakthrough that they wanted, either themselves personally, or when in discussion with their therapist. But with this book, I feel like Jill Rabin says it's kind of the parents who hold the power a lot of the time. And that's actually the way Baby-Led Weaning took off in the UK and throughout the world. It has been parents who have pushed it, and therapists and nurses and so on.

Gill Rapley (18m 9s):

Who've come along kind of afterwards, for the most case, that's not obviously true of the present company who've gone with it straight away, but in general, it's been parents who have pushed it. And so I think this book to go to the pediatrician or therapist or whatever, clutching this book will give parents a lot more confidence to argue their case for their baby to be encouraged to do what he or she can do. And for that to be recognized.

Jill Rabin (18m 34s):

I would say too, another thing I think that's been happening as a lot of these younger dietitians and occupational and speech pathologists are doing Baby-Led Weaning with their own babies. And then they're saying, oh wow, this is great. So they're seeing the effects with their own children. And I think it's making them more willing to use that approach with their patients. My hope is in the future that all feeding therapists are going to implement this approach or at least, you know, be thoroughly and intimately, you know, educated about it. So they know it's, it's a choice to use with their patients.

Katie Ferraro (19m 6s):

And I feel the same way in nutrition, but it's on us as the leaders of our respective fields to really make sure that that's quality education that's going out there. Because as we know there is so much misinformation and that's kind of a good segue to my next question. I do get concerned a lot in the Baby-Led Weaning space is seeing non-credentialed and self-proclaimed experts giving infant feeding advice. And while much of this may be well-intentioned. A lot of the advice being dulled out, especially on social media is unsafe. It's unsubstantiated. It can be downright dangerous. So I wanted to know if either of you could speak to the importance of sourcing infant feeding information from reputable sources and credentialed feeding experts such as yourselves, if you feel comfortable answering that question?

Gill Rapley (19m 45s):

I think you're absolutely right that social media can take something and actually it can end up being distorted very quickly. So one person shares, as you say, with the best food in the world, how they implemented Baby-Led Weaning, which will be kind of as the name implies baby-led, it'll be kind of geared to their baby and their baby's experience. And, and so they'll be presenting that. Somebody else hears that and they adapt that for their baby instead of the original sense of what Baby-Led Weaning is. So I always feel it's important for people to have a text that they can go back to, to actually find out from the horse's mouth if you like, what really Baby-Led Weaning is. And in this case, Adapted Baby-Led Weaning, and then they can make their own adaptations and their own implementation for their own baby.

Gill Rapley (20m 30s):

But that is one of the problems with social media that very, very quickly you get a sort of distortion. And so that means that somebody coming to it, like, you know, several generations down in, in the, in the media cycle, if you like is seeing something that isn't really Baby-Led Weaning at all, that's actually something that that's an amalgam of other people have put into it. So we absolutely want social media. That is how Baby-Led Weaning got out there in the first place. If it hadn't been for social media, we would not be where we are now. And only a few people would have heard about it, but it's just recognizing what the pitfalls are of that. And having as a backup, a source that you can come to that gets it the way it originally was explained,

Jill Rabin (21m 9s):

Yes, this is Jill Rabin. And I would say a lot of parents tell me they get very overwhelmed. They're just literally assaulted by all the accounts about feeding. And I teach a transition to solids class, and I always tell parents, I give specific websites and social media accounts. And I said to them that, you know, someone doing Baby-Led Weaning with their one child does not make them an expert. I see that so much where people have done it once with their child and then suddenly they're an expert on it. And it's very, very frustrating because again, like Jill said, they, everybody's kind of doing a mixture of different things and it's not really the true regular Baby-Led Weaning the way that we would see it. So I do think that social media is a blessing and a curse.

Jill Rabin (21m 49s):

It can be very, very helpful, but I think it can be extremely overwhelming for parents. So it is really, really important that they're getting information from reliable sources and I'm hoping that our book will be that reliable source for them.

Katie Ferraro (22m 1s):

And I don't know if this is a redundant question, Jill Rabin, but what is your hope for this book? Like essentially, how do you want it to impact the families that you've worked with them for a very long time with feeding challenges, but then also knowing the limitations of the feeding professional world and feeding therapists, where there definitely is a lot of friction and Baby-Led Weaning can be a contentious topic. How do you hope that this book will maybe either eliminate some of that friction or at least work to reduce it?

Jill Rabin (22m 26s):

I'm hoping that Adapted Baby-Led Weaning and Baby-Led Weaning are going to become more of the norm. So people are going to see that as a viable approach for transitioning babies. And I feel like what I do see, but maybe it is my narrow world because the accounts I follow are ones that do things similar to what I do. But I'm hoping that therapists and families are just going to see this as that option for their baby. So I'm hoping this book is going to really give people all the steps that they need to take, to bring to their therapist, to bring to their medical doctors so they can feel comfortable and safe in doing this with their baby and feeding their baby. Just like they fed their other children who may not have a diagnosis or a feeding challenge. I will tell you that I helped a family in Switzerland that Gill actually referred to me.

Jill Rabin (23m 10s):

And this child is actually, his story is in our book. And they told this mom that she could not do Baby-Led Weaning, and she really wanted to do it. And I worked with her and that little guy rocked Baby-Led Weaning. And she went back on, her physician said, oh my goodness, how did you do this? He couldn't believe how this child was eating. So I feel like that's the time that we can say, oh, I got all this information from this book. So my hope is that everybody will see it as, as an option for their children. It's going to become more of the norm versus kind of a novel thing. I mean, everybody thinks this is like a novel trend thing. I don't see this as a trend at all.

Katie Ferraro (23m 44s):

I always say that it's not a flash in the pan, some woo-woo parenting technique. And I think kind of, you know, the elephant in the room is the importance of research. You know, we need to continually be leaning on the research that supports Baby-Led Weaning as a safe and alternative to what Gill Rapley calls, conventional parent-led spoonfeeding. And so continuing to do the research to show so that, you know, telling anecdotal stories is important and showing a baby with Down syndrome, eating is important. However, in order for the established medical community to take Baby-Led Weaning serious, we do need to continue to have this emerging body of research come out. And it is. And I think, especially in the United States, so much of the research pointing towards the importance of diet diversity, that we know that the greater, the variety of foods and flavors and tastes and textures that babies can try early and often that really does support their ability to become an independent eater.

Katie Ferraro (24m 34s):

We know it's helping to reduce the risk of food allergy down the road, it's looking like it does help reduce picky eating, although that's, you know, a very contentious issue in and of itself. But the research is so important and having professionals research this area. So for Gill Rapley, I'm just curious, as far as the research world goes, what do you see on the horizon as far as being important for keeping the field moving forward and having it more established and more accepted by the traditional medical culture of our respective countries and around the world?

Gill Rapley (25m 1s):

I think it's happening already. I'm, I'm quite excited that so many texts, research papers and statements from sort of public bodies that come out now mentioned Baby-Led Weaning. They may not be totally on board with it, but their, it's out there it's being spoken about, which is fantastic. But it's another reason why we need the papers and the books like our one to make it clear what actually Baby-Led Weaning is, because one of the problems with research is that if Baby-Led Weaning isn't and Adapted Baby-Led Weaning are not properly defined, many, many pieces of research that have been done so far have simply asked parents, are you doing Baby-Led Weaning or not? And as we've just discussed, it can look very different with different babies.

Gill Rapley (25m 44s):

So, and some people say they're doing a little bit of it. We had, I know we had a discussion about this. I've mentioned it many times that Baby-Led Weaning. Isn't a whole approach. It's not just whether or not you give your baby food to hold occasionally. So we need that definition in order for the research that we are getting to be meaningful. So I'm kind of constantly pushing for that, but it really is already happening. So often now I'm reading about it. I have Google alerts for any papers and social media stuff about Baby-Led Weaning. And I can't keep up with it now, whereas it was kind of one or two things a week before, now, every day it's full of these notifications because it's, it's just out there and that's,

Katie Ferraro (26m 24s):

Some are better than others. And more truthful than others, for sure,

Gill Rapley (26m 28s):

Absolutely. Absolutely. There's a mixture there, but in the academic world, you know, papers on introducing solid foods, if they don't mention it now that's odd and they are out of touch.

Katie Ferraro (26m 38s):

I agree. They did not do a thorough lit review if they're not mentioning it. Well tell us where we can go to learn more about your work. And then also, where do we get the book?

Jill Rabin (26m 45s):

To get the book, if you go to my Instagram, which is called @jillrabinablw, the link is in my bio. We our publishing company is called The Experiment. You can find it on Amazon. You can find it in any major bookseller, Barnes & Noble, any place where major books are sold. If you click on that link in my bio, you'll see there's lots of choices of where to purchase it. It also find more information. I have a website that will be up in the fall, and I currently teach a virtual classes to parents about ABLW, but I am going to have some classes on there that parents can watch on demand. And I'm going to create one for professionals as well. So that will be another source. And that website will be www.jillrabin.com.

Jill Rabin (27m 28s):

But another place that you can actually watch a webinar about my approach is through the Chicago Feeding Group. If you Google "Chicago feeding group, thinkific," you can find my Adapted Baby-Led Weaning course on there, it's very inexpensive on that site. And it's about a two hour webinar that will give you a good idea of what Adapted Baby-Led Weaning is. I will tell you that it is two years old and I've really updated and made a lot of changes even since then, but it's still going to give you the gist of what Adapted Baby-Led Weaning is.

Katie Ferraro (27m 58s):

Okay. And Gill Rapley, where are your locations on the internet these days?

Gill Rapley (28m 3s):

I confess to not being quite as active as my colleague, Jill Rabin,

Katie Ferraro (28m 7s):

Cause you're up til 2:30 writing books with her

Gill Rapley (28m 10s):

That might have something to do with it, but I have my own website, rapleyweaning.com. And as we're recording this, I'm building one with Tracey Merkott called allaboutBLW.com, which I hope will be up and running by the time this episode goes out. So there will be links on there. Something else I just wanted to add. One of the things that people who buy the book may find helpful is that we've got a, quite an extensive resources section, which identifies some reliable websites, Instagrams, books, which we feel are where parents and professionals will get good information. So if you want further reading or to find things which are accessible in a different way, starting with our book is still a really good place.

Katie Ferraro (28m 53s):

Wonderful. Well, thank you so much both for being here and for doing this interview, but also for writing this book for our parents, for our feeding therapists, for our feeding community, it's really exciting. And I'll link to all of your respective resources inside the show notes page for this episode, if you go to blwpodcast.com thank you so much for your time, ladies.

Gill Rapley (29m 12s):

Thank you.

Katie Ferraro (29m 13s):

Well, I hope you guys enjoyed that interview with Gill Rapley and Jill Rabin, their brand new book about the Adapted Baby-Led Weaning approach is available now. I'm going to link to their respective resources as well as the book on the show notes for this episode, which you can find at blwpodcast.com/260. Thanks so much for listening. I'll see you next time.