Sunday, March 30, 2014

Blended diet, pizza party, and life....

It's finally spring!!!!!
I have really been getting into using my blender and making Laynie all sorts of new recipes for her blended diet. She is doing horrible with eating by mouth and no longer even wants to put much in her mouth. I have no clue what happened, but I'm a little bummed about it:(
I am hoping one day it will click and she will decide she wants to try to eat. I was thinking maybe when our new baby starts eating solids she MIGHT want to try to keep up?!?! Who knows! I have been trying to make a batch and freeze it every week so I have a little bit of a stock pile when this baby is born. I spend a lot of time making her food and it will be nice to have a bunch frozen.
I started with baby food and I continued using it for a long time because it was so easy, but now I just use all types of food. It really isn't that hard. If you think about it, why wouldn't we want to feed her the same stuff that any other three year old eats, rather than a can of formula and chemicals???? So that is what I do. I still use the formula as a base because it has a lot of vitamins and nutrients and that way I don't have to worry too much about getting all of those in with the other foods. Some of the stuff she has been getting is chicken, bread, peanut butter, avocado, banana, strawberries, applesauce, spinach, corn, beans, peas, carrots, cereal, ect... the list goes on and on!
The difference this diet makes for her is priceless. I used to watch her retch and vomit immediately after 90% of her meals. She would get all sweaty and look completely miserable. It was so hard to watch. She had already had a surgery to prevent her from vomiting, was on reflux medicine, and was on a specialized prescribed formula. Every test came back normal, she just couldn't tolerate her feedings. The next option was to turn her g-tube (gastrostomy tube) into a jg-tube. This would make her food go into her jejunum and she would be on a pump about 20 hours a day. It would be such a huge pain to have her hooked up to her pump constantly. I don't know why I decided to ramble on about this on my blog, but it has been such a huge blessing to all of us and it makes me sad to know that most dieticians and GI docs don't support this. We had to figure it out on our own (with the help from other CHARGE moms). Now I am just crossing my fingers that insurance will cover some blended diets that I can purchase so I can stop spending hours blending food, but it is sooooo worth it!
We had a beautiful day last week and took full advantage. It has been so windy lately. That is what I really hate about our spring in Idaho. We played with our neighbors and the kids had a ball, like always!!!!




Drake had a pizza party at preschool and Laynie and I got to go and help. It was fun seeing him in his class interacting with his buddies. I have helped at preschool before, but it is always on field trips and not in the classroom.
Dominoes pizza came and taught them how to make a pizza, they got to smell all sorts of toppings and decide if they smelled yummy or yucky, and got to eat pizza!



Drake smelling the anchovies......

Laynie thought she was the coolest person on earth since she got to go to school with her brother. Drake's whole class really liked her and gave her a lot of attention. It was pretty cute:)
She is pretending to eat her pizza and water! She will be in preschool next year and it makes me so nervous for her!!!


She was getting ready to get in the bath and she decided she wanted to do push-ups. She is a funny girlie with a really cute naked bum!!!


Movie night.... Watching Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs 2. I wish they would stay like this for the whole movie, but it only lasts about 10 minutes!


It is officially spring break and this is what we woke up to! Looks like we should have planned a vacation to somewhere warm. So depressing... I am ready for some GOOD spring weather!!!!

2 comments:

Rachel Murray said...

Thank you for "rambling" about Laynie's tube feeds. I have been meaning to ask you more about Laynie's oral eating/tube feeds. The thing that is stressing me out the most with Ellie these days is her tube feeds and oral eating -- or lack there of. I am going to send you an email instead of getting into it all in a comment, but I am definitely doing a blended diet when Ellie gets older.

Rachel Murray said...

P.S. is your friend's name Kristi Denning? The girl in that picture with you looks like a girl I played volleyball with in high school.