A Little Something Extra

Saturday, October 23, 2010

31 for 21... Micah's eating skills

I've discovered a major upside to this 31 for 21 thing... I can look at LAST October and see progress.

We've been gradually adding a bit of wheat germ to Micah's yogurt in an effort to get him more comfortable with textures in his food.  He seemed to cross some sort of threshold a few weeks ago and he can now handle a very thick, grainy consistency.  So I decided to try Stage 3 foods on him this past week.  And what do you know?  He's eating it!  He doesn't know how to chew, so he's swallowing the small chunks of carrots whole (with the occasional gagging incident).  But that's great progress because he used to gag and puke if any sort of texture would hit his tongue.

Micah is doing great with his therapists too.  He goes to private feeding twice a week (once with an OT, once with a SLP).  We also added private PT at the same clinic a few weeks ago and he immediately responded well to her (that's not a common occurrence for Micah... it usually takes him a long time to warm up to a therapist).  The school district has therapists who come to see him at home too: PT, OT, SLP, and DT.  Micah seems to be doing a bit better at his private therapy sessions lately.  I think that's somewhat related to me not being in the room with him... which might be another good reason for him to start school soon... (more on that later).  Back to eating...

Micah will make an attempt at self-feeding occasionally.  I think it's time to "force" him into that (give him a spoon and a bowl of yogurt and let him go to town).  But I definitely need to be more comfortable with spending time cleaning up after meals, if you catch my drift.

One thing that Micah is NOT doing is drinking.  Anything.  At least for me.  He might take a sip of milk or water, but after that I get a "No!"  I think he drinks more for his SLP.

So, just to reminisce, I'll end this blog posting with the same paragraph as last year's post:

One of these days we'll be able to get rid of the feeding tube. It could be a year or two. But it's so wonderful to see progress!


     GLOSSARY:
     SLP - Speech and Language Pathologist
     OT - Occupational Therapist
     PT - Physical Therapist
     DT - Developmental Therapist, aka Special Ed Teacher (are they one and the same?  I'm not exactly sure.)

4 comments:

RK said...

Progress is important! Feeding is SO DARN SLOW in it's improvement, at least when you've got as much ground to make up as your guy and my girl have... but wow, the celebrations that happen when there IS improvement!

The texture progress Micah's making is really great! The self-feeding part is so hard. I know exactly what you mean about the mess element. I struggle with that in a big way. We're working on it, but Braska's still not motivated to eat, though she is able to do pretty well with yogurt. She just lets it sit on her tray. Doesn't care enough to eat it... motivation is really key, and we don't have it.

Keep working with him. Sounds like he's getting tons of great service help... One day soon. One day he'll get there!

my family said...

sounds like he is doing well. Good job Micha!

my family said...

OOPS Micah :)

Elisabeth said...

That's wonderful that Micah is eating 3rd foods! That's such a big step!