14 Bites!

Unless your child has dysphagia it is unlikely that you can understand how exciting it is when they willingly eat a few bites. Especially when your child really doesn't eat despite hours and hours of feeding "therapy"(oral torture might be a better term). For whatever reason Ainsley has rediscovered her vibrating alligator and is putting the entire end in her mouth and biting on it. And LIKES it. Who can be sure but it seems to be helping because today she ate 14 bites of her homemade puree.

A few months ago she took 9 bites for several days in a row and then refused to take more than one. I pushed since she'd shown she could do it. I thought she was being defiant and sat there for over an hour trying to get her to take just one bite. Then I paid the price for not following her cues and she's refused to eat since then (well maybe a bite here and there). We've been gradually working back where we were before and today she topped her 9 bites by eating 14 and I've learned my lesson! We'll see where this leads us. There was one time in Cincinnati when she'd been NPO for a procedure that she ate several ounces of food (really and that's about 40 bites). We've never had that kind of success since even when she's hungry.

I'm hoping we'll see more improvement once they've removed her enlarged tonsils.

I did make a change to her homemade formula and started cooking the vegetables so it could just be that the food tastes better to her. I was feeling like the raw vegetables were giving her a bit too much fiber, if you know what I mean. So for my convenience I've been cooking a huge batch of veggies and keeping it in a container in the frig so I can just scoop out several veggie servings really quickly. This batch contained: green beans, baby carrots, spinach, potato, corn, broccoli and peas. I do think she seems to prefer to eat the homemade formula over single flavor baby foods (banana, apples, peas). Who knows why. I don't think it tastes as good but you hear that kids will eat what they are tube fed. Perhaps it's familiar to her but her formula contains: bread, milk, half&half, yogurt, OJ, apple sauce, bananas, chicken, veggies, olive oil and vitamins all mixed together. It's kind of sweet and reminds me a tad of an Orange Julius, remember those? Still, I wouldn't want to drink it.

Whatever the reason I hope she keeps it up. Of course with a tonsillectomy only 2 weeks away she will obviously not eat for awhile afterward.