Nom Nom Nom

I'm pretty sure we have covered Alex's habit of cramming so much food in his mouth he gags.  He's getting better about it, but we still have to remind him to slow down and take smaller bites.  Welp, looks like this is something that runs in our gene pool somewhere because Sam is following the over-stuffed-mouth path Alex laid out before him.

Sam employs the same tactic of taking as big of a bite as possible, and then he either stays the course of Alex which involves gagging and sometimes puking, or goes his own way.  When he goes his own way, he sits with a mouth so full of food, that while he's chewing the food starts squishing back out as it has no where else to go.  But instead of letting the escaping food be free, he crams it back in with the back of his hand.  And then it squishes out again and he again uses the back of his hand as a food barricade.  Repeat until the food is finally manageable and consumed.

Obviously I am trying to manage the size of the bites of food that go in this child's mouth.  But that, of course, gets tricky too.  He prefers to bite food.  It irritates him if I cut it up for him.  If he truly had his way, he would hold the food and take bites off to his liking.  But since I would like to keep my CPR skills in reserve, that is a no go.  Which puts me back to cutting his food up into appropriately sizes pieces.  And that's been a no go from his camp.  Those perfectly portioned bites are apparently better suited for a deployment of air delivered dog food.

He won't eat cut up food, but I can't let him hold the whole piece of food, so I end up holding it.  But then you have to throw in the little fact that I also want to keep my fingers.  What we end up with is me holding the food at an appropriate bite amount, with my fingers delicately placed a proper food cutting technique pose:

Last night, he eyed up and demanded a banana while I was foolishly trying to get him to eat some bite sized chicken.  I held on to it without the aforementioned technique, and let him take a bite.  The back of the hand food barricade was in full effect after this one.