First meals

- Cooked apples (peeled and sliced to wedges. Cooked till fork tender with a little water and cinnamon) - Banana - cooked green beans - avocado toast strips - cooked carrots (till fork tender) - anything soft enough to mash with the back with a fork that is a strip or spear shaped.

There’s no right or wrong to start with really! Try to introduce top allergens one at a time so you know what has caused a reaction if they have one. Some people like to hold off on giving fruit as they might develop a preference for sweet. I did spears of avocado, strips of egg omelette and spears of banana. You can also give them preloaded spoons of natural purées like yogurt.

We went straight in with meals. In his first week he’d had korma and rice, sausage pasta and homemade goujons and potato wedges.

Thank you every one it just worrys me about choking so wasn’t sure how best to start

I also found it stressful to start but just remember there’s a difference between gagging and choking. Your little one is likely to gag in the beginning- it helps them understand how not to choke. So if they’re making noise or are red, they are gagging and it’s normal and just let them work it out. If they’re silent and/or going blue, then they need you to act and help them. If you haven’t already, take an infant first aid course. I found that helped with my anxiety a lot.

As horrible as it sounds just make sure you’re aware of how to help them in the emergency of them actually choking and you needing to get it out. There’s plenty of ambulance services who make videos online showing you how to help a choking baby or toddler, and resuscitation. I looked at all this to make sure I was prepared in the worst case situation, he has gagged a lot but never choked and never intervene if they are gagging, don’t blindly sweep food out of their mouth either. Simply gagging and then you intervening too early could mean they start to choke instead when they weren’t in the first place. You’ll feel more confident and comfortable about it if you learn all of that and the signs for choking vs gagging before starting! Bigger bits are better because they can pull off the size that they can take rather than having small bits in their mouth which are easier to choke on x

My son actually gags and struggles more with “puree” like yoghurt than he does finger foods, it all sounds scary but really there’s just as much of a risk of choking with purees as there is finger foods! You can spoon feed some bits to them if you like but they’ll start trying to grab the spoon themselves, I use two spoons, one for me and one for him, he has a baby textured spoon that is double ended so it’s easier for him to use and i’ll just spoon feed him between loading up his own spoon or he gets upset having to wait for another bite x