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| Age 3? I better get to work!!! |
Today at therapy, Thomas ate just over two ounces of applesauce. This is a measurable amount of food and it's a huge hurtle. It's a real beginning. I can't tell you how excited I am. It took us so long to find out that Tom didn't have adequate oral motor skills. For months and months we suffered in ignorance and I beat my head against the wall. I thought I just needed to keep trying different foods and that one day he would magically like one and begin to eat. Ha! Ridiculous. That's not the way it works. It wasn't that he didn't want to eat. He didn't know how!
His mouth didn't know what to do with food. When he tried to eat it he used to gag and often threw up. Eating is actually a learned activity. Your tongue needs to move in certain ways to get the food to the sides of your mouth so it can be chewed and then move it back to be swallowed. Tom's tongue only used to go back and forth. Now when he eats I can see it moving sideways too! The Children's Institute of Pittsburgh is a magical place. The therapy he gets there is really what has helped him develop the skills necessary to eat by mouth.
And coincidentally, with these new tongue skills have come eating breakthroughs. He is chewing and swallowing cheese puffs like it's no big deal. He ate four of them for his occupational therapist last Friday! And this past Saturday, Tommy ate an entire portion of baby food for his Dad and I. You don't know how many times I have put baby food into a bowl only to have one or two bites eaten. To actually finish a plate of food is amazing progress.
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| No more chips until he gets more practice! |
i am sure if its possible and reasonable you will help Tommy meat his goal. :) You are really a great mom
ReplyDeletefirst of all, I'd like to say, great blog and that you seem like a great mum. I really had no idea eating is a learned skill. I can't remember having problems eating myself, but I was scared to try foods I didn't know when I was very little. However now I eat everything really.
ReplyDeleteWhen he's old enough, it could be a good idea to get him drawing paper which swells when he draws on it so he can feel the shapes he draws, and a lego board with bricks which have Braille letters and normal letters on them. I loved those things as a child and even my sighted friends found the board interesting and liked touching the Braille.
Picture books are good too and I still have mine so that I can use them when I one day get children. Recognizing pictures with your fingers is not easy, and those books are great for developing those skills. A woman here in Norway used to make some even nicer ones where she'd glew actual things into the books. For example, I've got one book about an old crab who's looking to see the beautiful pearl just once before he dies, and on the way he talks to lots of seacreatures which are glewd inside the book. Mostly those which live in shells.
Keep up the fantastic work. Your son sounds adorable and I am fascinated with the blog and it makes me realise all the extra work my mum had to do to raise me.
Linn