Being two eats it with a spoon (we hope)!

You may have heard that Teddy has been going to a feeding clinic. We’d originally scheduled the appointment with the feeding clinic back in October when he seemed to keep throwing up. We thought that maybe he had a problem eating and it was causing him to have trouble keeping his food down. We thought it might have been a problem with some scar tissue from surgery or something like that, potentially. Of course, a week after scheduling that appointment, he more or less stopped with the routine of stuffing his face and then vomiting because of course he did.

However, they have a 6 month wait list to get into the feeding clinic. Once you make the appointment, you probably don’t want to lose it if you can keep it, so we did. We noticed that he was pretty picky about eating, and in particular that he’d still stuff his mouth, chew stuff up, and then spit a bunch of it out. So we wanted to see what we could do to curb that. What they observed is that there’s a problem with how much food he’s eating. Specifically, his weight gain has sort of leveled off, and that’s not what we want. We want him to pack on the pounds and grow, and he’s not doing that as fast as he should be.

So now he has bi-weekly meetings with the Children’s Hospital feeding clinic’s occupational therapist to work on getting him to eat better. Part of it is being 2. He doesn’t want to stop playing to eat. We’ve also checked with his dentist (actually, he had his first dentist appointment last week) and while there’s nothing wrong with his teeth, he’s still getting his molars in. So he’s not doing a great job with rotary chewing, but rather, he tries to chew everything up with his incisors. So that’s part of his issue. The other part is that when he was learning to eat solids, his core wasn’t 100% there, so he had trouble keeping his head up for long periods of time, which probably led to some compensating habits. The good news is that he seems to be doing a better job at the whole eating thing.

...and here's how he's grown.

He started like this...