Productive Communication to Baby: You Can Do it!
It is 2 o'clock in the afternoon. Alula just wakes up from her second nap of the day. Her mood is good. She has been more than one hour apart from her last milk. Mama thinks it's the perfect time to have lunch.
Her menu today is cauliflower, long beans, fried salmon, and strawberry. I wash her hands, put her on the baby chair, put her bib on, and we recited a pray together. As usual, I will put her finger foods one at a time onto her table. She doesn't like to have too many food in the table. Maybe she thinks it's messy. Or maybe it makes her confuse of what to choose. Well, as she can't talk yet, mama can just guess, hehe..
For the first bite, I put the fried salmon. There's a reason why. She likes to have salmon but she's still learning how to handle the salmon pieces once it enters her mouth. Salmon breaks so easily, but unfortunately it is still too troublesome to chew for the toothless Alula. She often bites a big chunks of salmon. Of course it's difficult to swallow. It makes her gags once in a while. And, if her tummy already fills up with other food, most probably the gag will be followed by vomit. That's why mama put the salmon first on the table before anything else.
She grabs the salmon slowly, observes it for a while and starts to direct it into her mouth. The bite is quite big. I observe her while getting ready just in case she gags. She makes a funny face, which means that there's too many food in my mouth but I don't know what should I do. Hahaha!
It's time to implement a productive communication. I look at her in the eyes "I see you have so many salmons in there. Chew slowly like this, baby.. (while mimicking how to chew)." She tries to chew that big chunks of salmon very hard. At some point she almost give up and almost spit everything. Before that happens, I encourage her "That's right Lulu. That's how you chew. You can do it!" (while still mimicking how to chew). After couple of chews, finally Alula is able to swallow all the salmons she bite. "That's really great, Alula. You can chew the salmons. Yeayyy!" She looks happy with my praise. She giggles and asks more food. Alhamdulillahh..
