Food camp

Greetings from food camp! Sorry it's taken a while to write, but our schedule is very full, so by the time we get back to the hotel I'm fried.

Roxanne has feeding therapy four times a day with Polly Tarbell, the guru of the whole program. Polly has being helping kids learn to eat for over 15 years, and really knows her stuff. Roxanne is lucky enough to be getting one-on-one therapy with Polly herself -- I was expecting an assistant to step in occasionally.

The idea is that most kids start getting exposure to non-liquid food around 6 or 8 months old. They're curious about what mom and dad are eating, and they squish it and taste it, and are introduced to lots of foods while they still get almost of their nutrition from formula or milk. Then kids start getting baby food, and move forward from there. Roxanne missed all that, so while we're slowly reducing her tube feedings, Polly is rapidly introducing Roxanne to lots of different kinds of foods, (often four or five different things), four times a day, every day this week.

I know enough about feeding training to know that there's no magic involved, and that Roxanne won't suddenly start eating all her meals orally. But over this week, she has been showing less resistence to eating, and more self-motivation in picking up food and putting it in her mouth. However, the progress is slow, so Roxanne and I will be coming back to UVA next week to keep up the good work. By the way, I feel very lucky we ended up here as opposed to other feeding programs, many of which force feed kids until they break down and stop resisting. That's GOTTA mess with their minds.

Our schedule goes something like this:

Feeding training
Tube feeding
Recreation therapy (guided play with cool toys)
Nap
Feeding training
Tube feeding
Break (she likes to go for walks or swing)
Feeding training
Preschool (a teacher reads to her, she plays with educational toys)
Feeding training
Tube feeding
Nap

After that, I'm done for the day (around 4pm), but I still need to do feeding training at dinner, and give Roxanne another tube feeding (they have broken them up into more, smaller, feedings.)

I'm nervous about going home for the weekend, where we won't have Polly to guide the feedings. I'm concerned we're going to lose the momentum we started here. But I've been watching and asking a lot of questions, and hopefully, I've picked up on some of Polly's techniques to encourage Roxanne to eat. Wish us luck.