Feeding Clinic Follow-up

All smiles after her appointment 

brushing her new teeth

Hey all!  After our last post ended up having a kind of downer attitude, we decided we should do a quick update tonight.  

Margaret had an initial evaluation with a new feeding clinic this week and we are SO excited about how things went.  Now, we are well aware of the fact that feeding issues take time, usually a long time, to overcome but we think we have found a place where we feel more comfortable.  Our last team just didn't seem like the right fit for us but that doesn't mean they aren't fabulous and haven't had a lot of great success with other families.  We just didn't feel our needs were being met the way that we thought they should so decided to move on.  Our new clinic is much closer to our house as well.

We went into our appointment expecting the team to have a basic understanding of Margaret's complicated medical history, but it turns out, they hadn't received any information yet.  Yikes!  As soon as I started talking the therapists cleared their schedules so they could spend more time with us --- talk about feeling like you're being listened to!  

she likes the spoon - w/o food ha

We got everyone updated as best as we could and talked about what our hopes and goals are for Margaret: eating orally being the #1 priority.  In order to get to this goal, obviously we have to meet other milestones first.  

a girl and her pepper LOL

Margaret was nervous at first and had a nice tight grip on my shirt until she realized that she wasn't going to be poked or prodded by these new people.  She quickly warmed up to the therapists and before we knew it she was interrupting our conversations to squeal and scream as if she was offended that all of the attention wasn't on her quite yet. 😜

Margaret's new team is happy with the feeding schedule she is currently on and super impressed with her growth.  They were glad to hear that her reflux has improved even if she still struggles with it - most of the time she doesn't appear to be in any pain from it but it's definitely still a big issue.  The team was also happy to hear that we were able to transition Margaret off of the elemental formula onto a "regular" type.  The team agrees that we need more guidance and we will now have weekly, that's right WEEKLY, Occupational Therapy (OT) sessions.  Margaret needs to learn to trust and become comfortable with the therapists so a lot of what we will be doing for a while will be strategizing and coming up with things to try each week.  Bill and I feel excited that we will have an OT working with us to help us move Margaret forward.  Up until now, most of our experience with feeding clinics has been "don't do this or you will cause her to have an oral aversion" -- it just really felt like more focus was on what not to do instead of what to try.  

We are optimistic and refreshed.  Margaret is growing so fast and we want to make sure the teams working with her are taking into consideration her growth and we move forward with her therapies as well.  It's going to be long and frustrating, but by golly, we're going to get this girl to eat someday!  

Check it out --- she's been willing to bite down on bottles lately and even appeared to swallow a little bit of formula, too!  Baby steps!