New Feeding Goals

Hayden's speech therapist, Leah, came today. She has been working with him on feeding for quite some time. She actually was the first person to ever feed the boys from bottles when they were in the NICU. Normally, I may be a little sad that someone other than their parents were the first to feed them, but we really like Leah, so as long as it was her that fed them first, I am okay with it.


We talked about how things were going since her last visit a couple of weeks ago. Not much had changed. I did let her know that we had success (he didn't gag or vomit) with yogurt and pudding, and that the mandarin oranges didn't go well at all. He gagged on every piece no matter how small.


She could tell he really wasn't in the mood to eat, so she warmed him up by touching his arms and them working her way up to his mouth. He was fine until she got to his face. Then, he really tried to avoid her touch. She started with a sippy cup with water. Since he won't use his left hand and he wants to be in control of the cup, we can only use cups with handles. No improvement there, so we moved on to peas that he could mash in his mouth. He wasn't into that at all, so yogurt was next. That went so-so. We had some left over bacon (I wasn't home when it was cooked. That's why there was some left over.), so we gave him a good chunk to experiment with. It was cold and had an interesting texture, so he played with it for a while until he brought it to his mouth. Bacon was a hit! It seems that Mr. Hayden prefers salty things with a strong flavor. He likes to lick beef jerky, chips, french fries, and actually like to eat gravies. Some of these things he doesn't get very often now that he has teeth and can break off pieces very quickly. This coupled with his aversion to actually eating anything has given us a new goal. To find foods that he will play with and bring to his mouth. Actually eating the food is no longer our goal at this point. We don't want to force him to eat things and cause him to regress. Besides, all the vomiting and gagging while eating probably doesn't really make him want to eat.


Now, we are going to find foods to offer him that he can hold and chew on without actually biting any off. Pretzel sticks, carrots, celery, jerky, suckers, popsicles are all options for Hayden to try. We are also going to try to dip the vegetables and spoons in ranch, ketchup, tarter sauce, mayo, jelly, etc to see if anything trips his trigger. We are also going to try to see if we can get him to use an open cup. In the past, this wasn't successful since he moves his head from side to side so much. We'll try thick shakes or smoothies to keep the flow slow and maybe he'll be more accepting of it since the flow of the fluid won't be such a surprise. It will be fun to see how creative we can get and even more fun to see if Hayden really likes anything.