Baby Led Weaning

Hello,

I'm new to this forum, and to the whole BLW idea. I do know what it's about and have known for a while, I know other moms who have BLW their babies successfully, but for some reason didn't think it was for me and my baby, even after discussing it with my husband, and after he seemed to be interested in the idea.

So, I exclusively breastfed my baby until he was 6 months old; and then I started introducing him to solids, based on the Super Nutrition for Babies book, which recommends feeding babies soft egg yolks, meat, liver, healthy fat, no porridge, etc. So my baby's first solid food was mashed avocado, and he loved it. I continued with mashed veggies, from carrots to broccoli. Then at 7 months I introduced beef stew and served it with rice, pasta, risotto, chicken curries, and mashed them with a hand blender before serving.

At 8 months we started to cut the food in very tiny pieces, still pureeing some of the dishes we made. Now my baby is 9.5 months old and I have a huge problem. I can't feed my baby finger food. Not because he can't eat it, because he is actually ready, and has two teeth on top of all, but because I get terrified by the thought of him chocking. My husband tried giving him a stick of cucumber once, and my baby loved it, but I was panicking every time he would bite off a piece of cucumber,or if he ever gagged. I know that gagging is a reflex that helps them bring the food back to the mouth for an extra round of shewing, but I still can't help getting super anxious and nervous about it.

I'm afraid that, because of me, my baby is running behind in the whole eating by himself thing. Other babies that I know, that are the same age as he is, totally manage the grabbing and eating of fruits, bread, veggies, as it should be, and I can't even get my self to give him anything for him to grab and eat without getting super nervous and anxious. I tried with peas the other day, and my baby had such a hard time grabbing the tiny peas with his fingers, which I've seen other babies even younger than him do, and I know it's because I don't let him grab food and eat by himself. I feel so bad for keeping him behind

At the same time, the whole cooking special meals for him is becoming way too much... too time consuming, leaving no time to do anything else than cooking. So I've been thinking about starting him on BLW, but I don't know if it will work, since he's been already eating solids for three months, and I don't know at this point how to do it.

Can someone please advise if it would be a good idea to switch from conventional weaning to BLW at this stage? and if so, what would you recommend me doing to start off?

I appreciate your help!
Thanks in advance

I don't think you need to think of it as switching, honestly. No matter what the weaning method, finger foods would be part of things from 9 months. So, really, what you're mainly looking at is ways to help yourself calm down about choking. Here's some things that might help:

-As I said above, finger foods are generally recommended by this age regardless of weaning method. That means lots and lots of babies are happily graduating to finger foods and not choking.
-Choking is actually thankfully quite rare, is no more common for BLW babies than TW babies, and often happens to older kids. This is because it's more about bad luck than what's being eaten (although obviously there are some higher risk foods, raw apples and carrots, whole nuts, grapes, and cherry tomatoes, hot dogs...)
-Doing an infant resus course can help so you know you'd know what to do if a choking incident did occur.
-You haven't quite described the gag reflex right. It is basically a place on your tongue where, if something too big to swallow hits it, an eject reflex is triggered. On young babies, it is located quite far forward on the tongue, which means that if baby gets a piece they'd have trouble swallowing, they will gag it out before it has a chance to get anywhere near blocking their airway. Their bodies are ingeniously designed to help keep them safe while eating!
-Another thing that occurred to me is that perhaps you might ask your husband to take over the transition to finger foods? If he did say one meal a day with finger foods on offer and you could leave the room, you can spare yourself the trauma and let your little guy move on without him seeing your anxiety.

Hope you can get past this. Remember, little babies have been transitioning to solid food since the dawn of the species, and most of them do just fine with it!