That's Life 7/18/11

So much going on, where do I begin?

L finally recovered from his tonsil surgery. He's back to normal except he's no longer drinking his prescription formula. Mostly that's good, but it's also scary because that means we have to replace 900 calories from formula with actual food. And he's still quite a picky eater. So meal time is even harder than ever.

We succeeded in moving our speech appointments to a later time for the start of kindergarten and full school days. Amazing, miraculous achievement! So far, I'm enjoying our new schedule.

We had L's birthday party. Once again it was at Peter Piper Pizza and again they did a super awesome job. Everything went smoothly and I actually had time to talk to the other moms. And it ended up being a great group, really pleased how it turned out. :-)

As usual, I have tons of things I want to post about but I'm lousy at the follow through. We'll see if I can get some new posts up this week. Fingers crossed!

What have you been up to? Let me know in the comments. How's your summer going?!

EE Update

So I just wrote this post about our morning routine and had to add a blurb to explain why my 5-year-old is drinking bottles before preschool. Tons of fun. But I pat myself on the back for publishing the post anyway, rather than being embarrassed by our little bottle-drinking situation. Anywho... it made me realize I am long overdue with an EE update--I can't believe I haven't blogged the whole off-the-bottle/back-on-the-bottle saga.

The Saga of the Bottles

Just before Halloween (October 2010), L finished a bottle, put it on the counter and said thoughtfully, "bottles are for babies; I am not a baby" and I jumped at the chance to offer him all sorts of cups to drink from. He sat right there and started drinking formula from a cup. Woohoo. This was right before bed, so we wondered how it would go the next day. He woke up and I asked if he still wanted to drink from the cup and he was up for it and he drank the whole thing. The first day was a huge success, so I thought we had turned the corner.

Over the next couple months, he drank less and less out of a cup. {I'm skipping ahead, there was a whole go-to-the-store-to-pick-out-cups adventure and he chose McQueen take-and-toss cups with straws.} We then tried mixing the Neocate with Nesquik to make chocolate "milk" and his volume went up briefly. Then his nutritionist cautioned us against using Nesquik because it is cross contaminated by things like wheat. Then his volume dropped anyway and we went back to the tried and true Neocate mixed with orange Pedialyte.

Then just before Christmas, he was sick with a cold and drinking barely any formula and getting quite lethargic. We panicked and asked L if he'd like to drink from a bottle. To our surprise, he said yes, he would like a bottle. First, we weren't sure he even remembered how to drink from a bottle, but soon enough he downed the whole thing. We were so relieved.

We went to the pediatrician's office the next morning. She diagnosed a sinus infection and when I told her how we'd freaked and given him a bottle, she assured us the reason he hadn't been drinking was the illness, the post-nasal drip explains everything, go back to the cup. But L didn't want to go back to the cup. Hubby didn't want to go back to him not getting enough volume. So as of late December, L is back on bottles. After 2 months without. :-(

The good news is that while his volume of Neocate was going down, he started eating more real food. So he is back on bottles, but fewer of them. Before the switch to cups, he was drinking nearly 42 oz of Neocate per day (7 bottles times 6 oz/bottle). We offered 7 cups a day and he drank very few ounces of each. So when we went back to bottles, we are down to 4 bottles per day (28 oz total), with the difference made up with real nutrition from solid food. Yea!

Finally, last month we had an appointment with his gastroenterologist and told her the whole long story. Her first reaction was to try to get him back to a cup. Her main point is that getting off the bottles will only get harder as he gets older. I replied that he still has the skill to drink the cup and we are keeping that up, like on road trips, but now that he is drinking less volume, he can get through a day of school by eating real food, and my husband's theory is that the way off the bottle is to get off of Neocate--by eating more and more food. She pretty much agreed. So to avoid headaches and heartaches, we are back on the bottles. L is getting his nutrition, but they don't really interfere with our life because he can get through a school day without it and if we are out and about I can bring a thermos of Neocate and it's fine. The end.

Eating

L is eating meals better than ever. Some of his new foods include:
-Sunbutter sandwiches (on gluten free bread)
-quesadillas (on rice tortillas)
-hamburgers (on gluten free buns)

The addition of hamburgers has been the biggest success--since he has long refused any kind of beef. It's been a long time coming. Two things helped: (1) he wanted to try Daddy's burger and (2) we finally found gluten free buns (at Trader Joe's). Woohoo! Now burgers are his "favorite food." Of course we doll up an entire half a burger (cheese, mayo, ketchup, mustard) and he eats 3 bites, but it's a huge success!

Okay, I think that's the EE report for now. Everything else is just business as usual. Oh and I completely forgot to schedule an allergist appointment (we should have gone before Christmas) so I'll have to do that soon. I'm hoping to get back to doing my "week in review" thang and updating EE in those posts.

Update

Lots of wild stuff going on around here! I know I have a totally random blog and don't talk about at-home stuff a whole lot. As in all things, I blame my lack of time management skills. Anyway, I hope you will rejoice in these triumphs with me even if you didn't know about our trials.



First off, L is finally pooping on the potty!!! That's right, he is 5 years old and not totally potty trained. Clearly I am the world's worst mother, go ahead and judge. We've tried various things, gotten advice from both his pediatrician and his gastroenterologist, but ultimately he wasn't ready.



So how did this miracle happen? Well, it seems to have been a combination of the end of naps (I would put him in a diaper at naptime and that's when he'd poop, but now he no longer naps), some particularly urgent poops, and peer pressure. I hope it helped that I'd been sitting him on the potty each day, maybe that got him comfortable with the unknown. And it certainly helped that once he'd done it the first time (one of those urgent poops) he got lots of cheers and prizes.



Within ten days of that breakthrough, he gave up bottles!!! I've talked several times on here about his Eosinophilic Esophagitis and that he drinks this really awful formula (Neocate Jr.)and we're really fortunate he has never needed a feeding tube, but the flip side is he continued to drink from baby bottles, even at 5 years old. Again, we've tried a variety of methods (and cups, straws, etc.) and two feeding therapists, but ultimately it was just about L being ready. Two weeks ago, he put his 8pm bottle on the counter and said "Hmmm, bottles are for babies. I am not a baby." And I jumped up and said, "would you like to use a cup instead?" and proceeded to go through the cabinets offering all the different and cool cups and straws we own. He sat down with an extra cup of formula and drank it and said "mmm, this is so good!" and daddy and I sat there with him talking about how he's such a big boy and no more bottles and we'll go shopping tomorrow and pick out some new cups.... Oh and of course we gave him a prize. :-)



We worried about what would happen the next day. When he got up, he was willing to have a cup instead of a bottle and he got a prize when he finished. (Thankfully I'd just stocked up on prizes when he started pooping the week before.) He has kept it up ever since. No bottles for over 2 weeks!!! And unlike the time we took the bottles from him on our initiative rather than his, his volume hasn't significantly dropped. Instead of 7 bottles a day, he gets 7 cups. However, the downside of the transition is that he could drink a bottle in 5 to 10 minutes, it takes him much longer with the cup--so sometimes he doesn't finish in time to head to school or to speech and that is where his volume has dipped a little. We're hoping his speed will pick up with time.

After a few days without bottles, he said to me "I'm a big boy now: one, I poop on the potty, two, I can open the white gate {this is an odd thing for him to list since he's been opening our baby gates for a long time} and three, no more bottles." And I replied, "yes, I think we should have a big boy party." So I guess we'll be having a party soon (when the grandparents visit next week).

The transitions have been a little tough, as I think transitions always are, because I am a creature of habit and rely on my routines. Drinking cups can take a long time and I often have to remind him to "drink, drink, drink." And of course pooping is still new and different and causes us all to stop what we're doing when L says, "I've gotta go poop." But it's all for the good and we rejoice in these huge successes for our big boy. Yea!