My girl is 14 months and she's a food stuffer. It's like she thinks that she's only getting one chance a day to eat, so she has to cram everything in her mouth all at once 🤦 I promise I feed this child all day long with either 3 meals and 2 snacks or 2 meals and 3 snacks. Either way she eats 5 times a day and I let her tell me when she's done eating. She also is still breastfed, so plenty of food, I promise.

I still break most food up into bite sized pieces. I break them up small enough that if she does swallow anything whole, it'll go down without her choking. Crackers I tend to break into 4 or 5 pieces because they melt and fall apart easily. I'm working on slowly giving her larger pieces, but it seems like anytime I do, she gets gagged really bad and the other day she did almost choke on a piece of pancake that was maybe about the size of a silver dollar. I was about to take her out of the high chair and start doing back blows but she got it worked out.

And before anyone says anything, I do know the difference in gagging and choking. She was red around her eyes, mouth open, and not breathing, so definitely choking. I'm just thankful she got it worked out herself. We've been doing BLW since about 6.5 months, so it's not like she isn't used to eating table food or even bigger pieces since we did finger length and width pieces in the beginning. But she just crams so much food in her mouth at a time and I get really nervous. If I try finger-sized pieces she just puts the whole thing in her mouth, tries to chew it, and either swallows a huge chunk with lots of gagging or she pulls all of it out of her mouth and then just does it again with a new piece. I'm mostly thinking of toast in this moment but she's done it with peach and pear slices too (cut really really thin)

So at what age did you hand your child a whole cracker or anything and could trust they would actually take a bite out of it and not try to fit the entire piece in their mouth?