My ds isn't great at swallowing lumps.

[HeadFairy]

He's ten months old (nearly 11) and he's had a mixture of purees and BLW. To be honest he's never been great at the BLW playing with the food rather than eating it (I always gave him solid lumps before any purees to get him to eat them first) but he's not great at swallowing things that need a bit of chewing. He's got 8 teeth so that shouldn't be the issue, but I did some chicken and veggies for tea, and mushed the chicken up to fingernail sized lumps or even a bit smaller. He'll take a mouthfull and swallow all the veggies but the chicken just sits in his mouth and he won't take any more. It's not just chicken, but a few things that involve a bit of chewing. Any ideas how I can encourage him a bit more?

He's happy to eat mush by the way... I just gave him a Plum pot and he wolfed it.

We must have the same baby!!
DS is now 10 months too..... i'll be watching this one wit interest.

Fingernail size lumps sound quite big to me. I'd make them smaller, maybe like the size of sweeteners so he gets used to the feel of 'gritty' food in his mouth. Lentil purrees are quite good for this too. Or you can get 'baby pasta', tiny stars. Ds1 was 18 months or so before he'd happily take lumps as big as you describe.

DS2 is happily blw himself on chunky veg, toast, biscotti, etc etc but still struggles with lumps in his pureed food (we're doing a mix of purrees and blw).

Even if he's got 8 teeth are they in the right place to grind together? He's probably still gumming most of his food tbh hence why the squisy veg vanish but not the stringy chicken.

Thanks for that Pheebe, I'll try making the lumps smaller. Having read Aitch's blog and a few other threads about BLW I was keen to get him chewing a bit more and on to larger lumps but maybe I'm rushing him. His teeth are all front teeth so not really chewing teeth. I did give him some tiny pasta shells (they're the type of pasta used for soups so teeny tiny) but he didn't chew much of those either, normally he's ok with soft pasta. Maybe yesterday was just a bad day. Poor love was starving last night though, I had to give him a bottle of formula after he'd bf'd and another one at 11pm.