At first I wanted to go with the ‘whole food, self feeding method.’ Basically you give the baby large chunks of the food that you are eating. The idea is that the baby can self feed, and eat as much of as little as they would like. They can also select the foods that appeal to them.
In theory this sounded great, but not in practice. I gave him chunks of apples and carrot. The problem was that he would gnaw off a hunk, then cough and gag on the piece of food. I was a nervous mom, and couldn’t do it anymore.
So we switched gears completely to the traditional pureed baby mush.
Baby mush works fine, except that Kyton gets really really upset when we have food, and he does not have the same food. If you can’t tell by his size our kid LOVES food! I talked to a friend who does the whole food method. She assured me that it is normal to gag every now and then. When we sit down to eat dinner, Kyton wants what we are eating.
Two nights ago I gave him a piece of asparagus. (Asparagus was our dinner.) He ate it, and did great. We broke it up a little bit into bite sized pieces, that he could easily swallow. He self fed, and begged for more. Last night he self fed pieces of butternut squash and pears.
After hearing from other moms on the many uses of the mesh feeder, we used it this evening with butternut squash.
I think that we are sort of doing a hybrid of chunks and baby mush… really we are still figuring out what works for us.
What are your thoughts on baby food? What works (worked) for you?
