when do they start chewing their food??

[hazlinh]

dd is one year old and she has something like 4-5 lower teeth and 4 upper teeth (all in the centre/front). she has been eating baby biscuits since about 6-7 months and seems fine with them, but started feeding her small slices of cheese recently, and she loved them so much that i may have given her too much and the problem is that she suddenly vomited and the shocking thing is the cheese bits were all exactly the same size as when i had fed them to her!!she hadnt bothered to chew them at all!!! when do they learn to chew and what should i do? what should i be feeding her? I'd thot at this stage that i'd no longer be feeding her mashed or pureed food .

or does she have a more sinister digestive problem? she vomited about 4 hours after i'd fed her the cheese

They don't really chew much until they get back teeth. Try chewing with your front teeth and you'll see the problem -- they're designed for biting, not chewing. They kind of mash things between their gums and they bite them off, but they don't really chew. Add that to the fact that their little stomachs don't digest much and it's a miracle to me that food does any good for them at all. It's staggering the resemblance between input and output. Nonetheless, they apparently do manage to extract some nourishment out of it.

It doesn't sound like a sinister digestive problem or anything else. Cheese might not agree with her -- has she had other dairy products before? Or she might just have a virus, as mine did last time I thought I'd given her the wrong thing. She threw up every 2 hours for a whole day, and then I caught it, so I was really pretty sure it wasn't a food allergy.

At 11 months, DD eats all sorts of things, and it does make for interesting diapers (both pickles and blueberries can be very shocking) but she enjoys it and thrives on it, chewed or not.

Hazlinh .... my DD's nappy had whole raisins in it this morning
She only has 4 teeth (2 top and 2 bottom) the 2nd top one only came last week ... so she is not great at chewing but she definitely prefers proper food to baby food now and will wolf down a sandwich but turn her nose up at anything mashed ....
Your DD may not like cheese that much. DS hated cheese as a baby, or rather, he loved it but he always chundered a couple of hours later ... and there is nothing worse than cheesy vomit [pukey emoticon]
He eats cheese now and isn't sick (he is 5 years old) but he still hates cheesy sauces ....