A little over a year ago, I bought some of those Gerber puffs at the grocery store and scattered them across the tray of Preston's highchair. At this point, he was still nursing, and we had begun introducing cereal and
homemade pureed fruits and vegetables into his diet. Now it was time to work on self-feeding, a seemingly easy milestone on the path of growing up. After all, that Cheerios commercial where the mom gives her baby one, saying how it was her first food, too, made it look like something that would happen successfully in less than 30 seconds. (And I base all of my core truths on commercials.)
Well, like most things I think about parenting, I was proven wrong. Preston would pick up and play with the puff but wouldn't put them in his mouth. But this is the kid who never put anything weird in his mouth. Sure, he'd chew on toys and of course his beloved paci, but I never had to watch him to make sure he wasn't eating leaves, coins or other choking hazards. I knew this wasn't typical of his age at the time, but thought little else about it. Besides, Preston is my cautious, deliberate, thoughtful child. From a young age, he wouldn't do anything he wasn't completely comfortable with, as evidenced by the fact that he didn't walk until he was 17 months old. But when he started, he hardly ever fell or stumbled.
After letting him play with the puffs, I finally stuck one in his mouth for him to eat to show him it was food and not a scary, foreign object. He moved it around in his mouth for a bit, but the second it started to move to the back of his mouth, he panicked, gagged, and spit it all up. Tears ensued, so I cleaned him off and canceled the lesson for the day. Next time.
Well, there were a lot of "next times," but never any successes. There was a lot of cleaning up throw up, though. So, I called it quits. The kid didn't have any teeth anyway, so we'd try again when he got some. Once a few teeth popped in, we tried again, but he wouldn't have it. The gag-filled lessons had scared off my cautious boy. Scott and I would show him how we did it, putting the food in our mouths and over-acting our chewing until it was all gone. All that taught Preston was to make really loud "Om-nom-nom" sounds. I tried ways of tricking him into it: making his pureed foods chunkier (on which he gagged), crumbling up graham crackers and putting that in his purees (on which he gagged), getting him quick-desolving yogurt drops (on which he gagged) … nothing seemed to work.
So, again, I called it quits. When he showed an interest in our foods, we'd try again. But as he got closer to 18 months old and was still not eating anything he had to chew, I got worried, egged on by the fact that he's in the third percentile for weight and height. Preston's doctor didn't seem concerned. He said to just keep at it. But wiping spit up and tears off my child's face (and fighting tears of my own) night after night didn't feel like it was helping. It just left both Preston and me frustrated and frazzled.
I felt like I'd failed my child. Eating is so basic; why wasn't I able to teach him how to? I was at a loss for what to do next.
About this time, I learned that speech therapy could actually help Preston. I had always thought speech therapy was for speech only, working with kids who have lisps or can't say the letter "T," but it covers a lot more than that. Feeding and eating actually play a huge part in speech development, and the act of chewing builds muscles that help the mouth form consonants later on.
I was so relieved to learn that there was an outside source I could go to. So much of the stress I felt and that Scott felt was that this was all on us, and now we would have someone else showing us some ideas and techniques that would help and who would also be an encouragement to Preston as well as us. Making it all the better was that there is a speech clinic at the university where I work, run by communication sciences and disorders undergraduate and graduate students along with their speech-pathologist professors, that could help us.
For the past three months, every Tuesday and Thursday afternoon, Preston has been going to his feeding therapy with one of the sweetest graduate students who his helping him become more and more comfortable with food. When I ask Preston what he does with Mrs. Erin, he says, "Bubbles!" but they actually do a lot more. He's to the point now where he will ask for certain foods, actually put them in his mouth (which, on its own, is SO HUGE for him), and take bites. Sometimes he chews that bite, but he still spits out the food, never swallowing it. But he's progressing, slowly but surely, and I am so incredibly thankful for his therapist, for his progress, and for finally feeling like we've found something to help Preston along.
I say all this because there were times where I thought he'd grow out of it, times where it was a struggle, and times where I felt like I had a weird kid whom I didn't understand. There were even more times where I didn't want to say anything to anyone else for fear they would think I had a weird kid, too. I worried about him and cried about him and wanted nothing more than to be able to automatically fix what was wrong with him.
But now I don't feel so hopeless. His progress makes me so proud, and I think that this will be the year he'll want to and be able to eat a piece of cake for his birthday. He's come a long way!
