Now, I have no idea if this is actually true or not but a good friend of mine is a nurse and she said that celery has a mild numbing effect on sore gums if served straight from the fridge. She implied that it contains some sort of anaesthetic but I've just spent 25 minutes Googling my socks off and found no actual proof of this. However, plenty of places recommend cold celery as teethers so it amounts to the same thing. (Perhaps I should take this opportunity to remind you that I am not in any sense qualified to give medical advice? Nor is Google, for that matter.)
I give Babybear half a stick at a time because she likes to put in in her mouth and yank it out, dragging it over her teeth, and the longer piece gives her better (and funnier) leverage. She loves it, and while she doesn't eat a great deal she generally chews off a good inch or so. Very handy for taking out, as it's clean and keeps well.
However, I just wanted to remind everyone that now the weather is getting colder, the days of BLW chicken soup are drawing in. In Scotland it's been bitter for a few weeks so we've had the opportunity to refine the recipe even further. Babybear is absolutely loving the big sticks of celery (still cringing with revulsion at the sight of carrot, sadly) and I appear to have cracked the 'no-salt' issue. Rather than using a stock cube to supplement my home-made chicken stock, we adults now content ourselves with sprinkling some Marigold bouillon into the soup at the table, which leaves Babybear with an utterly virtuous salt-free soup. It's not dinner party elegant, I'll grant you, but with the amount of cheese that child eats I really need to watch her salt intake.