She Ate Some Orange and She Liked It

Wearing Daddy's fedora..sideways.  She is fashion-forward :)

Baby-led weaning is supposed to happen at 6 months.  However, tonight at AYCE sushi with our lovely friends Larry & Cat, I just couldn't bear to see Baby L watch us eat (gorge, actually) while she had nothing to nosh on herself.  I'm a sucker that way.

Anyway, she's too young for seafood and grilled meat but they happened to have sliced oranges on the menu, and their oranges are *always* sweet (I really need to know where they're shopping), so I removed the skin from 2 orange wedges and set them on Baby L's miSwivel tray.  Lo and behold, she went straight for them.  And made a huge mess.  Like, orange pulp all over her seat straps, the tray, the seat, her body... but she managed to scrunch herself up to one edge of the tray and used it to help her scoop/shove parts of the wedges in her mouth.  I gather her hand-eye coordination is still developing.. :/

Unfortunately, she bit off more than she could gnaw, so I had to fish out a section of one of the wedges from her sticky lips (for fear that she'd choke).  She wouldn't let me get at the other part of the wedge, however; its pulpy goodness was already quite far back in her mouth and her gums and palate were totally engaged in full-force motion.  I watched with trepidation, anticipating the need to do a Heimlich (and hoping I might remember the maneuver on babies), but she just sort of gummed at the piece in her mouth and eventually swallowed the darn thing.  No adverse reaction whatsoever.

Mind you, after that she was pretty much done eating and so I removed the remainder of the wedges from her tray and began a lengthy wipe-down process on her and on her chair. 

Anyway, point is that I should have waited but I didn't, and I was lucky that my kid is probably like me (one of those people who doesn't need to chew something for like 20 chews before swallowing; I think I average about 4 chews per bite).  The other point is that, with BLW, the idea is that they won't choke because if they're smart enough to gnaw/bite/gum off pieces of food, they're already mastering the chew motion enough to masticate the food for swallowing.  They've learned the chew-before-swallowing order (unlike the puree babies who learn to swallow before they learn to chew).

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On a totally unrelated non-baby note, did you know that the iPhone 4 cameras are not both equally awesome?  The one that's facing away from you is awesome, but the one that faces you is sort of crappy.  I took a shot of my vain baby (who was admiring herself in my phone) using the lesser camera, and here it is:

Grainy, right?  But oh-so-cute.  I love this kid; her smile could end wars, I'm sure of it.