Week 2, Day 3

Gavin has his best day yet today!  He had his highest volume ever of food/PediaSure in the first meal of 8oz!  I have fed in every session, and it has done pretty well.  We are onto two new foods today, potato soup with yogurt in it and apricots with applesauce, and he’s done okay.  The apricots didn’t even phase him, probably because he can now handle just straight peaches!  The soup went okay.  Still lots of shutters after he takes his bites, and we had one little glimpse of Monster Gavin when I was feeding it to him where he informed me that he did not like it.  Thankfully, we were able to redirect him fairly quickly and we finished a pretty successful meal!

Gavin has continued to do well with chewing solid foods.  He desperately wants whatever I am eating, so I always give him a little piece to see what he can do.  Yesterday at my lunch time, Gavin asked for some goldfish, and so of course I dropped everything to get him the food he requested!  He proceeded to eat eight fish without spitting them out!!  I brought some goldfish into the clinic today to show off what I thought was Gavin’s impressive skills.  It is interesting how two people can look at a situation so differently.  From the mom’s perspective, all I could see was that Gavin had somewhat chewed the fish, but more importantly he swallowed it without gagging or vomiting!!!  That is a true success in my book.  From the therapist perspective, sure, Gavin chewed a little bit, but the majority of the goldfish stayed at the front of Gavin’s mouth where it he sucked on it until he could swallow it.  Not such a success when the goal is to completely chew the food with the back teeth before swallowing.  Anna gave him half of the goldfish, and he did great from both of our perspectives!!!  The bottom line is that I need to feed Gavin much smaller bites.  Tonight, people from Sephora (the makeup store) came in and made some homemade macaroni and cheese.  I cut it up into small pieces and did my best to monitor Gavin’s chewing and coach him through side chewing, and he actually ate a little over an ounce of mac & cheese!!!!  WAHOOO!!!!!   Again, I’m not sure Gavin had the perfect chew throughout the meal, and there was definitely some suckling going on, but he ate macaroni and cheese tonight! J

Other great news is that Gavin will not be getting any PediaSure in his pump tonight!!!  We have been working so hard to keep eliminate the night feeding, and Gavin actually consumed enough ounces during the day today!  This means that tomorrow morning will officially be a complete 24 hour period that Gavin has not been tubed any milk J