How do you get your child to eat table food without him puking his guts out?
That’s the million dollar question right now because Aiman doesn’t seem to keep anything down! Well, more accurately, he doesn’t keep any “real food” down, but does fine with pureed baby food. But when you’re trying to eat and a baby looks at your food with longing eyes and starts salivating, how are you supposed to refuse that child a bite.
Just one.
Just one little bite.
BAD IDEA!
Because there’s always the risk of him completely throwing up everything he’s had because he’ll choke on something -whether his own spit or a teeny tiny fragment of food-and cough, then vomit and continue to gag everything he’s had back up.
And I mean everything.
We literally feed him in fear of this one bite or that one spoonful being the one that causes a vomit avalanche. I say that he has the strongest gag reflex ever, but his pediatrician says that he’ll outgrow this phase.
Today I gave him some peas* and “he didn’t take it well” doesn’t even close to what happened. He choked and the entire 9 ounces of milk came back up.
Did you know that regurgitated whole milk looks like extra, extra thick cottage cheese? With a foul odor. Want to know just how incredibly disgusting I am? After he was done with puking everything up and allll over the living room, I was cleaning it up and picked up a glob of the “cheese” just to feel it’s consistency. Squished it a little, thought it was interesting, and then finished cleaning it up.
And fyi, it’s not as smooth as breast milk or slimy as formula.
Then later he had ravioli with turkey and vegatables and was fine! whoohoo! But I’ll admit that I was on guard the entire time and had shiny things, songs, and toys on standby to distract him from throwing up if he started gagging.
That’s how it usually goes; can’t feed him something new without standby distractions. And sometimes a bucket.
My husband and I also get a lot of crap from family members who think Aiman should be eating regular food by now, but we’re not going to rush anything. They say that we should’ve started him on solids earlier (he started at four months) or given him bits of food earlier (he started table food around 8ish months), but I doubt it would’ve made a difference. Aiman will get used to it when he gets used to it and as long as he doesn’t choke, everything is fine.
But he usually does**.
It’s alright baby love! You’ll get used to it sooner or later and we’ll continue to clean up the mess in the meantime.
But I’d appreciate it if you got used to it sooner rather than later.
*this isn’t the first time he’s had peas, but I was trying to sneak it into his mouth. Why sneak? Because he takes a good look at whatever anyone feeds him and only if he agrees will he allow you put it in his mouth. Oh and he generally doesn’t like green foods for some reason.
**In his defense, he doesn’t have his molars and only has two (incisors?) teeth in the front, at the top and bottom. So technically chewing isn’t possible. And if you can’t chew your food, how can you swallow whole bits of it without choking? I understand you, baby boy…
We’re just now starting to introduce Jazz to table food, he had rice today and looooooved it, once he figured out that it was food and not something to play with.
From what I’ve read, they can actually chew food with their gums! I was looking up something online and stumbled on websites about baby-led weaning, which I’m not planning to do (circa 12-14 months and it. is. over. I have enjoyed breastfeeding, but wedding season kicks in and I’m going to be shooting a lot more then…and it’s just not conducive to our lives for Jasper and Sean to come with me and Jasper nurse all the time. I may keep doing nursing-to-sleep up until 18 months or whenever Jasper stops, but we’ll see), and I found this site– http://babyledweaning.blogware.com/. All the women on there are giving their babies table food at like 6 or 7 months! And the babies chomp away with their gums. It takes a while–Jasper’s been getting table food all week, and today was the first day it actually made contact, was put into the mouth, and swallowed, and his two bottom teeth are there, they’ve broken through, but they’re not in all the way.
I think the way you’ve done it is great! Probably because it’s similar to what we’ve done, we introduced Jasper to solids around 6 months, and then the table food this month, so yeah.
I think it’s most important to just watch your baby for signs, and it seems like that’s what you’re doing!
Yeah they can, babies can chew with their gums–which aiman does as well, but i dont know. i guess its just not the same? definitely not like pureed food, obviously.
and about babyled-weaning? oh goodness. no. just no. aiman breastfed until he was about 10 monthish and stopped on his own. he wouldnt take it anymore and i was willing to go up to a year, so i guess it was close enough. definitely easier on me and not having to wean him.
so more than 12-14 months is just unbearable to me.
its great that you’re getting jazz introduced to it slowly and just keep watching for signs!
Ah! I’ve been trying to find the time to do a post about baby-led weaning! I’ll see if I can get it out this weekend… We’re not weaning Sadie in the sense of she’ll quit nursing anytime soon (it’s still working out really well for us, so I have no plans on stopping), but we’re focusing on her learning to eat real, whole foods instead of purees (which kind of sucks, since I made a ton of pureed baby foods, bah). And we just finished watching Food, Inc., and I’m all agitated. Gah, I’m just going to start writing now…maybe it’ll be a food series.
Hey Brooke,
Yeah, my whole problem is with getting Aiman on “real” food and off of pureed foods. Which you know, WOULD be easier on us too, but we’re definitely not going to push him. I’m just trying to slowly get him used to the idea of chewing then swallow versus just swallowing (with pureed).
But we’ll see, we’ll see.
And I’m looking forward to your post(s). Maybe you’ll give me some ideas. I’m looking for anything!