BLW mom's...

alita1

i've recently discovered baby led weaning.  tonight i'm looking at youtube videos.  i like the idea of LO exploring food but i'm concerned about choking hazards.  granted, i'd be there while LO is eating but, for instance, one of the videos i saw tonight had an 8 month old with half a strawberry.  it seems small and hard enough to get lodged in a little throat.  any experienced BLW mommies out there?  any thoughts/tips from your experience you can give me before i try this?

jillianfries

You can check out Chrysallys' blog.

Pumpkin111

Up until I saw her gobbling down cookies the other day did I realize it would be okay to quit chopping things to the size of her finger nail. 

Do what you're comfortable with. 

cabo_kate

Check over on the AP board, there was a post about this earlier today with a lot of great responses.

Basically, letting a child navigate food and use their mouths to explore on their own terms actually decreases the risk for choking. They gag, sure, but that's a good thing - it teaches them to spit out anything that they can't swallow and move it to the front of their mouths. Our pedi said as long as you can squash it between your thumb and forefinger, they can eat it. Except for things like peas, etc., which could get lodged in their tiny little windpipes. 

MizMac

You should keep researching, there are a few good articles out there on why BLW makes developmental sense.  From what I understand, developmentally babies learn to 1) put things in their mouths 2) chew and 3) move food to the back of their throat in order to swallow.  Those things go in order, so if a baby can't chew yet, he or she is less likely to choke if allowed to be in control of his or her own food, because without chewing he or she also lacks the ability to move the food to the back of the throat.  Also, babies have ridiculous gag reflexes to keep them from choking.  

I'm only speaking from research, not from experience ? ask me again in another few days!!  I'm still trying to work out whether I can introduce new foods during the week, since I work full-time and I don't want him to start new foods at daycare (for purely selfish reasons)!

CalinsBride

We just cut things into non-chokeable sizes. So when we give him a banana, we leave the peel on half of it, but we don't just hand him the entire banana. We cut a fourth of the banana out of the peel so he couldn't choke on it.

If you're not comfortable with half a strawberry, give a quarter of a strawberry.

We don't give him a whole apple (though he couldn't choke on that), we give apple slices thin enough that if he swallowed it whole it would just go right down.

Do what you're comfortable with. There are no hard and fast rules.

Chrysallys

The link was given to my blog already. I wrote an update about how BLW was going for us. If you go back a couple entries you can read about our first BLW meal with pictures.

Last night DS had "tacos". We have him pieces of taco shell, taco beef, olive bits, tomato bits, avocado pieces, and lettuce shreds. He seemed to like it well enough with no gagging at all.