{"id":396,"date":"2007-10-10T19:40:00","date_gmt":"2007-10-10T19:40:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.jennyandadam.com\/Jenny\/2007\/10\/food-for-thought-so-dont-even-try-to-put-it-anywhere-near-his-mouth.html"},"modified":"2007-10-10T19:40:00","modified_gmt":"2007-10-10T19:40:00","slug":"food-for-thought-so-dont-even-try-to-put-it-anywhere-near-his-mouth","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.jennyandadam.com\/Jenny\/2007\/10\/food-for-thought-so-dont-even-try-to-put-it-anywhere-near-his-mouth.html","title":{"rendered":"Food for Thought (So Don’t Even Try to Put It Anywhere Near His Mouth)"},"content":{"rendered":"

Long-time readers of this blog will remember that my son has eating<\/a> issues<\/a>. As in, he doesn’t. Oh, okay. That’s not true. He’s a little carboholic but his lips have never been sullied by an actual, real, whole vegetable. Never. Ever. He tolerated the stage one purees as a baby, but never progressed to stage two. <\/p>\n

I have a great picture of him on his one-year birthday, absolutely furious<\/i> at me for deigning to put a cupcake on his face. He wasn’t happy until the Goldfish came out. The teachers of the toddler room insisted that they’d never had a child who they couldn’t get to eat. Doodles made them cry uncle. It was the Tiny Tot teacher who finally said, “This isn’t normal,” which was completely validating. In entered Early Intervention. Doodles had an occupational therapist come to the house every week to work on sensory issues. In the beginning, the boy wouldn’t go near Play-doh, freaked out over shaving cream, and gagged at the mere site of bread. He also entered a short-term feeding group, where many kids came together and wouldn’t play with Play-doh, freaked out over shaving cream, and gagged at the mere site of just about every food imaginable. However, diligence won out and by the time he aged out of feeding therapy, he had added a wealth of new items to his list of foods he’d eat: bread, cake & cookies (oh joy), waffles, pancakes, French toast, and French fries (I know that doesn’t seem like an achievement, but it meant we could go out for a meal without packing up a zillion bags of cereal, Goldfish, and Veggie Booty). Shortly after he added pizza. A real food! (Okay, so not the realest of foods, but let me have my short-lived joy.) <\/p>\n

He was making enough progress that we decided not to pursue other feeding resources when he was no longer eligible for Early Intervention. Fast forward to his four-year doctor’s appointment. Still not eating any vegetables. Still not eating any fruit. Still not eating any meat. I could go on, but the list gets boring. The doctor decided it was time, to once again, call in reinforcements. <\/p>\n

Today Doodles started a new feeding group. It’s pretty cool, and he seemed to enjoy it. We’ll see how much he likes it once the novelty has worn off. It’s once a week for two hours (right smack in the middle of Pie’s nap time, but we’ll just have to deal with that), and I get to sit in a room with a one-way mirror and observe him (I wasn’t comfortable with the one-way mirror thing so I made sure to show him the room and let him know that I’d be sitting there watching him. I think it reassured him). <\/p>\n

Five kids are paired with five graduate students and they’re supervised by a specialist (I think she’s the only one in the area; it’s amazing we got in to this group, which just happened to graduate a couple of kids right before we called. The requirements for the group are pretty strict–such as no allergies–so we were very lucky). Everyone plays at first. Then it’s circle time where they read a book that has food in it in some prominent way. Today they read Chicks and Salsa<\/i><\/a>. Then, the group cooks. In keeping with the theme of the book, the kids made chicken fajitas. Doodles and his grad student cut green peppers together and chopped up cucumbers for the salsa. They had a hot plate out and the kids got to put things in the pan as they grilled them up. <\/p>\n

While things were cooking, the kids played and they rearranged the room, creating individual tables for each child and grad student. They then came back for “mouth time.” In mouth time, parents provide a food they’re working on and the grad students work with the kids one on one to help them. Doodles was working on apples. They cut him slices and took off the skin (the way we’ve had a smidgen of success before). He did a lot of gagging but they provided him with a bowl to spit into and he was told he could spit out food at any time (and he was excited tonight to learn the word “spittoon”). They worked with all the kids to lick food, hold it in their mouths, chew it and spit it out and whatever they needed. By the end of the session, he had bitten off a few bites of apples, chewed it, and “sent it to his tummy.” Doodles liked that so much he sent a few bites to his toes and his forehead and other various body parts. <\/p>\n

At the end of mouth time, the chicken fajitas came out. Doodles got to roll his own. At first, he tricked them into thinking he was actually eating it, but to one in the know such as myself, it was obvious he was merely eating the tortilla and avoiding the insides. They caught on quickly enough. They had him lick a number of new foods. He even ingested the tiniest smidgen of shredded cheese!<\/p>\n

Of course, we have homework to do with him: He has to have three bites of apple make it to his tummy every day (although he’s welcome to spit out whenever he needs to). We’ll see how it goes. And Pie wasn’t thrilled with being confined to the observation room for two hours when there was real food out there (everyone who passed through and saw Pie noshing on her carrots, peppers, and sugar snap peas was wowed with her eating; it’s not hard to excel in that group!). <\/p>\n

And me? I’m signing off to go have a big plate of sushi. Mmmm sushi. And I promised I won’t spit any of it out.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Long-time readers of this blog will remember that my son has eating issues. As in, he doesn’t. Oh, okay. That’s not true. He’s a little carboholic but his lips have never been sullied by an actual, real, whole vegetable. Never. Ever. He tolerated the stage one purees as a baby, but never progressed to stage […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-396","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jennyandadam.com\/Jenny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/396","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jennyandadam.com\/Jenny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jennyandadam.com\/Jenny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jennyandadam.com\/Jenny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jennyandadam.com\/Jenny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=396"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.jennyandadam.com\/Jenny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/396\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jennyandadam.com\/Jenny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=396"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jennyandadam.com\/Jenny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=396"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jennyandadam.com\/Jenny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=396"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}