It was Sunday night. Even though we are safely inland in the South, the wind is being fueled by Hurricane Sandy outside of my window. I hear the weather undoing all of the work my husband and I put into raking our yard today. The news keeps warning of the possibility of downed trees and power outages overnight as the winds rage on and the temperatures plummet.
All the while, I could really care less. It’s not that the nightmare storm that is bearing down on the Eastern seaboard isn’t significant – it is. It’s that a nightmare of epic proportions has occurred in the Reinventing household today, one that only a parent with sensory challenges can truly feel and appreciate. …continue reading
Meal time. Just the mention of those two little words is enough to make the pulse quicken and anxiety levels rise.
And that’s just me.
Feeding has been a huge issue in our house since day one. Literally. While I was still in the hospital recovering from an emergency c-section, my son was being seen several times a day by lactation consultants who were trying to help him learn how to latch on and nurse correctly. That never happened, so eventually we switched to bottle-feeding. Bottle-feeding was a challenge, too. It would take Jack over an hour to drink an 8-ounce bottle of formula, and he would then projectile vomit the entire contents of at least one bottle a day. At the time, we considered ourselves lucky if it was only one bottle a day.
Everyone kept assuring me that solid foods would be easier. It wasn’t. Jack did not want solids, and it was a struggle to get him to take them. When he would, he would gag and vomit, even on the smoothest stage one purees. I had these grand illusions of making my own baby food, but alas it wasn’t meant to be. I could never get the purees smooth enough for my baby.
By the time he was a year old, Jack was still eating only the smoothest stage one and two baby foods. Any chunky food would cause him to vomit. In vain, we tried food after food. As he approached 18 months old, Jack still could not feed himself. We spoke to his pediatrician, searching for a reason why feeding was so difficult for our boy, but we got no answers. We were told that we were coddling him, that he was just being picky, and that we needed to stop feeding him. After all, if he got hungry enough, he would eventually feed himself.
He never did. …continue reading
