Week 2, Day 1

Well, we had a good day!!  Gavin ate a little bit of broccoli/applesauce today!  He was sure to let Ms. Emily, the therapist who was thankfully introducing this new food instead of me, that he was not a fan of broccoli.  The good news is that he took it fairly well.  There was no screaming, hitting, and most importantly no spittingJ.  (I was assured that spitting will thankfully not be allowed or ignored and they will teach me how to appropriately correct that behavior)  Ms. Emily had his PediaSure ready as a chaser to the tiny bites of broccoli, and that seemed to work pretty well.  By the last meal he was taking relatively decent size spoonfuls of it without an immediate chaser! 

Each meal that Gavin has consists of a “circle” of foods.  He has had two pureed foods in each meal and a squeeze bottle of PediaSure.  We go around this “circle” taking one bite of each food and a drink.  This helps provide some structure to the meal, assuring that he will eat a little of each food.  Gavin is starting to pick up on this technique and is accepting that there is no way around eating the non-preferred foods. 

After Friday’s huge meltdown, Dr. Clawson has decided that I need to be a part of each meal.  This way Gavin will not get too comfortable with just the therapists feeding him and I can get some tips along the way!  I fed for the last five minutes of the first meal with his preferred yogurt and bananas, and again, the second I sat in the chair we had a little issue.  Gavin opened his mouth like he was going to gag and vomit.  It is really hard for me to know what is a behavioral reaction versus a true physical struggle with gas/air/food coming back up.  It is so hard to see him gag and vomit, and I tend to pull the food back and stop when I see him struggle.  The problem is that the smart little guy can pick up on my reaction to his gags and teach himself to force a gag or vomit to end the meal.  Sounds pretty dumb to make yourself throw up, but if eating is such an unpleasant experience I guess vomiting is the lesser of the two evils for him… Anyways, sure enough he got over whatever issue he had with a little distraction and we finished a successful meal J

I also fed again in the last session with the dreaded broccoli/applesauce, and we did well!  I just didn’t look at him after I gave him his bite and immediately started talking about the movie we were watching.  It seemed to work and he actually willingly opened his mouth for it without any real fuss!!!  That was a big success!

Like always, Gavin has enjoyed playing in the multiple toy rooms here!  We have had a lot of play time with his new friend Noah, who he now thinks is another cousinJ.  Guess he feels a connection to his feeding buddy!  I have moved Gavin out of the little crib they had for him and into the full bed with bedrails and LOTS of pillows.  He is very excited about his big boy bed and has done really well with it so far!  Here are some pictures!