Feeding Therapy Update

Here is my feeding therapy…

But this isn’t what I’m really posting about. I’m posting about sweet Yaya. Here is a little of what we do around here nowadays…

What you see above is food play therapy. I cut up certain foods, put out some dipping sauces (Ranch and Chocolate syrup are  featured here) and I usually put out  colored paper. We paint with the food and dipping sauces and occasionally lick our “paintbrushes.” Sometimes we hold our food between our teeth or alternate putting it on either side of our mouth. Then we do more licking. We have gone so far as to bite off the end of a pretzel, green pepper and apple, but we mostly do licking. The plastic bowls are “pahtooey” bowls if we want to spit stuff out of our mouth that scares us or if we are done with a food and want to move on to a different one. The wipes are there for obvious reasons. Sometimes I have small bowls of milk and we get straws and try to blow Cheerios or Cocoa puffs around the bowl. I hope that one day she will suck up the milk…but that is a really hard concept for her to grasp. Sometimes we have pretzels that we dip in a sauce and then pick up cheerios' or puffs with them. We occasionally will kiss foods goodbye or blow on them if they seem scary.  And by now you all are thinking that I am out of my mind. It feels that way. But wait there is more! Yaya’s food aversion was described to me this way. Something solid in her mouth triggers her fight, flight or freeze reflex. Did you hear that…it is our most primal, basic response to fear…and I mean terrorizing fear. It is mind boggling to think Yaya has that kind of feeling toward eating! Plus, it doesn’t help that her gag reflex is off the chart. Now, I was once a skeptic like many of you probably are right now until last week when she accidentally bit off the end of a green pepper. Terror shot across her face, her eyes became as big as saucers and she frantically signed “Pain, pain, pain, pain!! My immediate response was to grab the pahtooey bowl and tell her that it would not hurt her, that I would not giver her something that would hurt her or cause her pain to play with. I told her she could spit it out if she wanted but that it won’t hurt her. She eased visibly and then tentatively started chewing but looking to me for encouragement. Which I totally gave her 100 fold! I was so proud of her and I cried, “You did it!” and she echoed, “I hid id!” (still working on speech) At any rate the fear is real and it is unbelievable. Moving on to meal time!

Well, she is making progress but it is not without cost to us…it actually is more time consuming and annoying to make her food rather than quick and easy. We have to grind or mince up food to put in baby food for the purpose of adding texture. You see the white food grinder on the left. We actually just graduated from using that this week. Now we mince/dice all the food we want to add. We are working on bigger texture and things that may require a chew or two in order for her to swallow it comfortably. All of it can be easily swallowed by us without chewing but for her it is new to have semi-solid objects with shape and form in her mouth. She is doing great and canned fruits and veggies are our friends.  Soon we will cut back on the baby food to gradually remove it altogether and simply lightly mash or dice up whatever food we are eating. We will likely be doing that for awhile. She won’t move on to “normal” eating for quite some time. Well, we don’t think she will at this point but she always exceeds our expectations. If we could get her off baby food that would be such a huge victory for her. To be able to eat regular food, but simply have it cut up would be awesome. We aren’t sure what her chewing capabilities are because no one knows how her teeth line up or have been able to really look at her little under-developed teeth. They look more like chips of teeth rather than fully formed teeth; kinda reminds me of a shark. Eventually we will get her to a dentist, likely this year, and they can give us better insight as to how hard it will be for her to chew something like steak or chicken.

Our other major victory happened recently…

Yes, ladies and gentlemen, that is a toothbrush in her face!!! It only took us 11.5 months to get her to let us brush her teeth. Nice, eh? Pick you battles people! Pick your battles! Even the IAC doctor told us this about teeth brushing for Yaya. We had bigger fish to fry this past year. But she now LOVES for US to brush her teeth. She likes playing with it but I can, no joke, brush those little shark teeth till they are gleaming white and she loves it! Whew! Progress is progress even if it is slow! We celebrate the little victories!