Justin Morrice had the scare of a lifetime when his 10-month-old daughter, Annabelle, started choking.
Morrice gave Annabelle some Gerber Lil' Crunchies, a baked corn snack with real cheese. Annabelle had eaten this many times before. Morrice turned away for 10 seconds, but when he turned back, Annabelle was gasping for air.
"She was trying to cry but no sound was coming out," Morrice wrote in a Facebook post. "I rushed over and picked her up and turned her over and slapped her back (as we were taught) for what seemed like forever I still could not hear anything."
"It's at this moment I thought my little girl was going to die."
Justin Morrice didn't know what else to do, so he jammed his finger down Annabelle's throat and squished the snack enough to get her some air. "The next thing I heard was the sweetest sound in the world... her crying," he wrote. Morrice called it the "longest and scariest moment of his life."
But what went wrong? How did Annabelle choke on something she had eaten plenty of times before?
After both dad and daughter had calmed down, Morrice took a look at the container. The snacks boast about their attributes. "These delicious snacks have a meltable texture making them easy to chew and swallow!"
But then, in smaller print a little bit further down, it has some important information as well.
Morrice opened a new can of the snacks to compare the textures. He was shocked. "The ones in the can she choked on I can only describe to be like a foam ear plug. I could squish it but it would expand back out and would not break apart," he wrote. "The ones in the new can crumbled with ease."
Morrice doesn't blame Gerber, though. He just wants everyone to know the dangers that snacks like this can pose to young babies.
"My mistake almost cost me and they say 'learn from your mistakes' and I hope parents everywhere learn from mine."
Read Justin Morrice's full post here.