More than a mouth full

[toppette]

Hi

My 13 month old has this habit of shoving larger than ideal pieces of food in her mouth.  Then she sits there, cheeks bulging, trying to chew it.  What is this? Sometimes she even complains because her mouth is too full lol.  I've taken to either cutting everything up into bite size pieces, or giving her really large pieces that are obviously too big so she will take bites.  Even then, once the piece is "small enough" she will shove the rest in her mouth. 

Is this a phase? To me it looks like she is being lazy - can't be bothered holding and biting pieces off her food. 

[~ Vik ~]

My ds is the same way - my dh calls it 'chipmunking'   The only solution that I've come up with (if you can call it that) is to ensure that everything is bite sized and to limit the amount that I put on his tray - otherwise he just takes handfuls of the bite sized bits and shovels them all in his mouth at once   I also make sure that he deals with whatever is in his mouth (hopefully by swallowing it, but sometimes spitting it out ) before I give him any more.

He is getting better though - even over the past couple of weeks I've noticed that he's using his utensils more and taking more reasonable bites of food.  So, my guess is that it's a phase that you're just going to have to wait out.  Good luck!

[Colin Macs Mom]

Colin did the same thing, probably until he was about 3! He was well known in my entire family as the chipmunk! No idea why but some kids just do that.