Baby Led Feeding Attempt- Failure (for now!)

If you know me and read my last post about Baby Led Weaning (BLW), you were probably laughing hysterically because you KNEW I could never go through with it. (No comments, Crystal!!)

Here goes:

Last night, I was really excited about trying Ben on some broccoli. I also decided to give him a little rice cereal mush and half a banana for him to play with and attempt to suck on.

Caleb started cooking the broccoli while I gave Ben the banana….thinking he would really enjoy licking it and sucking on it. Nope! He attacked it and took one big bite! A big chunk of banana was in his mouth. Scary as hell! I kept telling myself, “Don’t freak out! Don’t freak out! If he can’t gum it, he can’t swallow it.” Sure enough, out spits the banana chunk….Phew!

Let’s move onto something else! =0) hehe…..so I handed him a cool mushy piece of broccoli, large enough for him to hold. Into the mouth it goes! Another huge chunk! Off comes all the little pieces. The face Ben made was priceless. Ben is NOT a fan of broccoli…. coupled with the fact that he is not a fan of little foreign pieces of food in his mouth, either. He started gagging a little bit….but it seemed SO much worse at the time. I think he coughed about 3 times, but it felt continuous!

Oh! I forgot to mention that he did spit out the broccoli, too. It was kind of like watching one of those yard sprinklers shoot out little bits of water…..Ben the automatic broccoli sprinkler.

To make matters EVEN worse, Caleb (my wonderful husband) decided he was going to leave me alone in this endeavor. He was making a broccoli salad in the kitchen. While I was trying to watch Ben “eat”, he joined us at the table with a bowl of his own broccoli creation. Wouldn’t you know….he starts gagging!! I glared at him and told his to get out! He looked at me with this pitiful face that read, “But what about me, I’m choking!” In retrospect it was really funny and really ironic. Caleb was able to cough up the broccoli on his own, too!

Anyway, our first attempt was much harder to watch than I realized. BLW sounds really good on paper, but I don’t think we are there yet. Since Ben spit the majority of the food out, I am going to try a little bit of food here and there until he really learns to gum it! In the meantime, we’re going to work on his pincer grasp (I read WAY too much about baby development!)!