Sick again

 

My poor little bubs… sick in bed with a fever and throwing up again.  Every trip to the hospital, even for scheduled appointments, always seems to end up with someone getting sick!

Feel better soon!

Mama

 

 

 

Party in our tummy

When we told Amina, our Occupational Therapist, about Henry eating a piece of quinoa and then wanting it back out again, she was thrilled… and totally understood his later apprehension.  As he’s never “eaten” anything before like that, once he realized what he’d done, then anxiety went up.

One of her suggestions was to talk about the food making friends with the other food that was in his tummy.  The quinoa joined the party that his tube food was having.  By “using up” time talking about the food making friends, it takes the stress out the situation; allows that critical time just after he’s swallowed something to be positive; and makes it seem like his mouth food is going to see his tube food (and since tube food is “okay” this the mouth food must be okay too).

So… a couple of days ago at snack time we had yogurt, granola and bananas in our bowl.  And guess what…

WE HAD A YOGURT PARTY IN OUR TUMMIES!

Henry has put yogurt, and other dips, on his finger before and tasted it (usually by “kissing” his finger), but it’s rare that he does it more than once or twice, and even rarer that he puts his finger right into his mouth and licks off the food.

But this time he did it multiple times!  We laughed, talked about the yogurt party we were having in our tummies, talked about how the yogurt was meeting his tube food.  He kept saying “more friends to the party” and then would lick his lips again!  He must have done it at least a dozen times.

 

Then yesterday night at dinner it happened again.  We were having fish, yams and quinoa salad and before either Shawn or I noticed, Henry put a small amount of yams on his spoon and put it in his mouth. Shawn very quietly said… “did you like those yams?” (I think we were both in shock!).  And Henry quite loudly said Yes!… Yam party!.  We both laughed and then I ate some yams too and said it was joining my fish for the party.

And then.. as if it wasn’t good enough already… he put one piece of quinoa in his mouth too so it could join the party.  He was so excited!  I couldn’t believe!  He started to get nervous with the quinoa in his mouth so one of us suggested having a drink of water if he needed to.  He did, the quinoa went down and the part continued!

As my lovely friend Nicola commented on Facebook: one small step for quinoa… one giant step for our little man!

 

Yippee 🙂 🙂 🙂

 

Bring on the party!

 

Cheers, Shelley

Happy Birthday Henry!

My sweet Henry is 3!

Yes, we had cake.  Someone asked me if I made a cake since Henry doesn’t eat it.  Absolutely!  There was cake and ice cream, topped with gummy sugar candies.  Yum!

 

After all… you need cake to blow out the candles!  Henry needed a little help from daddy to blow them out as he can’t do the blowing motion with his lips yet.  But with a little help all three candles went out :).

 

Cousins Ella and Seth, Auntie Debi, Uncle Derek, came for dinner.  Then Auntie Debi played Yellow Submarine by the Beattles on the guitar!  We love Yellow Submarine… we love the guitar… and we love Auntie Debi… it was the perfect birthday treat!

Next weekend we’re having some friends and their kids over for a “kids” party.  Chocolate cupcakes have been requested.  And we’ve been practicing blowing things to prepare for the candles!

 

Cheers, Shelley

One more quinoa

(I’m a little behind in my blogging… so some of these posts relate to things that happened in the past month.  Such is life these days… better late than never!)

 

He did it again… one more quinoa into his tummy…

 

He always needs a drink of water to “get it into his tummy”.  I’m not sure if that’s because he actually needs the water to help him swallow… if it just feels strange to him… if it’s just because water is a familiar feeling when swallowed… who knows.  At this stage… who cares!

The main point is he is starting to put things in his mouth and want them to go into his tummy.  This is a very big deal for us.  We have spent months just getting him to put things into his mouth.  For him to be making the cognitive leap to wanting things in his tummy is huge.

Can he actually eat?  Probably not.  He never learned how to chew food, form a ball, move it around with his tongue and get it ready to swallow.  We’re still learning all that.  But to have the desire to do so is a monumental step along the road.  We’ve talked about eating with our mouths a lot, and he says he wants to some day.  But this is first time it’s been more than a hypothetical conversation.

We have a long road ahead of us still… but we’ll walk along it one quinoa at a time!

Cheers, Shelley

Get it out… get it out…!

…that was Henry’s response when when the quinoa went into his tummy.  That’s right…

 

HE ATE A PIECE OF QUINOA!!!!!

 

All on his own… completely voluntarily… willingly… with not even a suggestion from Shawn or I beforehand.  He decided… he put it in… he drank the sip of water to “help get it into his tummy”.  For those of you unfamiliar with quinoa, it’s similar to rice and about the same size except roundish instead of long.

Yes.. it was just one tiny grain of quinoa…

 

BUT  THAT’S SOOOOOOO NOT THE POINT!

 

And then it’s like the light clicked on and he realized what he’d done.  He didn’t really get upset… but kept asking to get it out, want to it.  At first we thought that he thought the quinoa was still in his mouth and he was trying to get it out.  This we do quite often – put food in our mouths and take it back out again.  There’s no expectation of actually swallowing it.  The goal is just to get familiar with having food in there.

But no… he’s realized it had actually gone into his tummy and this wasn’t cool anymore.  So we spent the next 5 minutes celebrating food in our tummy… taLking about the food that was in our tummies too… we even phoned Granny to tell her about it.

In the end he was okay with the whole thing.  It was quite an exciting meal… trying out something new like that.  He only ate one piece, but one piece is one more than he’d even done before :).

 

Cheers, Shelley