Too Much....

Lately Nathan has been doing much better on his eating skills. This is of course all relative to where he started. Much better is generally taking 4-5 bites of food and swallowing about half of what goes in his mouth. He has finally figured out this summer that eating is as much social as it is for nutrition. This weekend was an exceptional weekend for Nathan in regards to eating. It actually started last weekend when I gave him a cup of yoplait yogurt and told him if he ate the whole thing he could choose the movie to watch as a family. It wasn't perfect, but in the time it took our family to eat dinner, Nathan had tried to eat the whole yogurt. He was so excited to be able to choose the movie! This weekend Ellie had a soccer game on Saturday morning. She had done very well at her first go at being the goalie so as a reward, we took the kids to get a snow cone. Nathan absolutely loves the tiger's blood flavor so Jake bought him a child sized cone (of the soft shaved ice) and Nathan ate about a cup worth. On Sunday evening we made pumpkin chocolate chip cookies. Now if there is one food that Nathan will eat consistently its chocolate! The heavenly smell of the fresh baked cookies were too much for him so he took a cookie and worked on eating it while we watched "Secretariate" as a family. Nathan was an ooey-gooey mess at the end of it, but he had managed to eat one small cookie and LOVED IT! He came over to me to show me the evidence (which was quite noticeable since it was all over his face and hands). When I asked him how much he ate, he rolled his eyes and me and said "Too Much!" Too much Buddy? At 31 pounds and 38 inches you are the only one in our family who can afford to pile it in! We are so excited for Nathan's progress in eating. Baby steps... that's what this process is. We are looking into sending Nathan to Baylor for an intensive feeding clinic for which the child would be hospitalized for aprox 4-8 weeks. That would be a huge sacrifice for our family, but we want Nathan to be able to get rid of his feeding tube. It may take a couple of years, but we have to try and encourage him the best we can. We have one more year until Nathan reaches Kindergarten and we want his peers to accept him as normal. Sigh. Sometimes this whole process is frustrating! But we will get there and everything will be ok.