Day 10:A Day for Extremes

Breakfast rocked!  Morning snack rocked!  Lunch was trying. Afternoon snack rocked!  Dinner almost sent ME under the table.  All in all though it was still a good day.  I am quite certain that Naomi met her calorie goals but we're still working on the fluid goals.  I have basically been put in charge with some rules and guidelines from the team.  They still establish when eating happens and where it happens and give me general direction about what, but I decide everything else and that's a lot of decision making.  Trying to balance the need for calories with the need for fluid and the need to expand to new foods in challenging.  Knowing that a new food is more likely to be accepted while hungry implies is should be offered early in the meal but new or non preferred foods are most likely to elicit negative behavior that can send the entire meal downhill fast.  Trying to balance a few more bites with a few more sips and when using regular cups determining if she is actually drinking or just pretending to drink.  Then working within what the food services can do is also challenging but thankfully today we made some breakthroughs with that.  Their oatmeal is soupy, like I could easily drink it with a straw soupy.  The dietary tech is going to buy us oatmeal packets so we can work on oatmeal but not offend Naomi so much with the soupy stuff.  We also are going to make some customized smoothies with higher fluid content fruit since Naomi is more likely to drink her fruit than eat it but we're going to limit fruit juice to 4 ounces as no one (who gets enough calories) needs more than 4 ounces of the stuff.

Breakfast today was eaten in record time and Naomi got lots of time to swing afterwards.  I was very impressed and I think she was too.  We had a visit from one of her kindergarten pals after breakfast who is down here vacationing.  Naomi loved seeing her friend and has been carting around the Minnie Mouse that she gave her.  Morning Snack went well, with being in such a good mood and even drank 9 ounces of fluid.  Lunch was not fun. White milk has been horrendous.  Naomi and I sat at an impasse over it at lunch for a good 15 minutes and I only got 5ml of it in her (1 teaspoon).  The dipping Oreo cookies that got her to drink 3/4 of an ounce yesterday wasn't happening today, in her own words and stares she basically told me that the Oreo cookies and I could take a hike.  I even drank the milk, and for those who know me well you know how much of a challenge that was for me, still no bueno, Naomi is not a fan of white milk.  We are going to start cutting her chocolate milk tomorrow so it will be 3 parts chocolate milk and 1 part white milk.  I'm not 100% sure if the team decided not to tell her we're doing it, but with the chocolate milk three times a day that is over 80grams of sugar and that doesn't include any of her other sweet foods.  We're also going to see if we can find a Stevia flavoring that we've used at home with the other kids.  On a bright note at lunch Naomi mixed foods very well and had a rice and bean burrito that she made and she allowed a piece of chicken and a small sliver of avocado to go in it too.  Afternoon snack was awesome, she ate a ton of celery.  I think it is likely her all time favorite food.  There are people, myself included, who would love to love celery for it's low calorie properties and here my child who struggles to eat can't get enough of it.  Thankfully she will dip it and we had it with ranch dressing, cream cheese and we even tasted hummus too.  We also had some pretzels, but really the celery was king. She also drank an 8 ounce bottle of water, quite impressive.  Dinner, I'm glad that's over.  She had spaghetti (a food she normally loves), green beans (a food she tolerates), cooked broccoli (she refused but will eat it raw), chocolate milk and a rice krispie treat.  She started off good and took several bites of spaghetti and few sips of milk and then told me very loudly how she felt about the broccoli, She was stalling so I made some boxes to check off and put a number next to each one and told her she could pick the food but I picked the number of bites, this worked for about three boxes but then when asked to pick she kept saying "I don't know" but without the words really.  I told her you choose or I'll choose, she didn't choose so I choose spaghetti and it was four bites.  She was not happy, she screamed "NOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!" "NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO! The choices are all MINE!!!"  over and over, then she cried.  The screaming was easy to ignore, the crying harder as this is the first time she has cried in relation to eating while here.  Then she hit me (which helped me get over feeling bad about the crying) but was very challenging to ignore.  She flung some food at me, and I sat there and ignored it.  Then she defiantly told me "I'm going to eat ALL my broccoli" and she did.  It was all I could do not to bust up laughing, she'd defying my request to eat a preferred food by eating a non-preferred food.  After eating her broccoli, screaming and yelling some more, she sweetly said, "I'm ready to eat my spaghetti now" and that's what she did.  Thankfully dinner ended on a positive note as that meant Naomi got to go to the playroom and I get a little break.  It is so hard to let go of the negative meal time behavior (or negative anytime behavior) and move on to the next activity with a clean slate.

Last night I was reading a blog of another mom and daughter (about the same age) who went through the program here and one of her posts talked about how she deserved a medal and I whole heartedly agree.  Her blog was quite refreshing and I really laughed as she wrote about the things her daughter did to avoid eating and I have to share a great video that she shared that basically shows what we're doing here with positive reinforcement.

So excited to have her finger and toe nails painted.

Lots of body art, sparkly toes and fingers and black lines down her leg that  she swears she didn't do, too bad she doesn't have a little sister to blame it on here.