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Health & Fitness

Our Love/Hate Relationship with Food

Our family's love/hate relationship with food as our son has struggled to master the art of self feeding and other improtant milestones, that most of us take for granted.

Our family has a love/hate relationship with food.  Mealtime is one of my son's favorite times of the day.  He loves to eat.  He always has.  Even when everything else in his development was lagging so far behind, eating/feeding always seemed to be keeping pace with "normal."  Sure, we had issues in the beginning with bottles.  Brady's muscle tone was so low that he struggled in the beginning with sucking and breathing at the same time.  Eventually, he conquered that and was sucking down bottles with the best of them.  Brady didn't start cereals until he was about six months old-he struggled a bit with the thickness and texture, but he got the hang of it and started to smile when we brought out the little bowl of mush.  He transitioned pretty well to baby foods.  He was amazingly agreeable to everything we put in front of him....carrots, peas, peaches, pears, sweet potatoes...even green beans and those funny smelling chicken and dumplings meals...Brady never protested.  It was amazing the difference in my little boy when he was eating....we forgot all about the "special needs."   Then "real" food came about the summer after he turned one.  I was nervous with every bite he took in the beginning...but over time, he seemed to be mastering all foods.  We followed all the rules about one year olds and table foods.  No grapes, hot dogs, nuts, gummy fruit snacks, peanut butter and so on.  I started to relax and enjoy the one thing that had come easily to my little boy.  Then he choked and almost died at eighteen months.  All those carefree feelings came to a screeching halt....The hate part of our family's relationship with food began.For almost six months after Brady's accident I couldn't feed Brady anything.  I would try.  I would sit with Brady as he waited anxiously for me to feed him spoonfuls of simple things like applesauce or cottage cheese and my hand would tremble and my heart would race.  I would have to call for my husband to handle the feedings.  I tried, but mostly I just watched Joe feed Brady.  We no longer trusted him to feed himself.  Every bite he had was given to him by us.  Every spoonful, every piece of banana, every forkful of beans, everything...Brady began to lose the ability to even feed himself.  I am not sure if he even trusted himself with food.  I cried so many tears during mealtimes.  Joe had to come home from work to feed Brady at lunch time.  We had to rearrange events and places Joe needed to go , just to make sure he would be home to feed Brady. Our lives revolved around feeding Brady, because that was all we thought about.  We were a very tense family.  Our daughter Molly couldn't relax when we sat down for dinner, or breakfast or lunch.  She would go in another room or just skip a meal all together to avoid watching her mom cry, as her daddy fed her little brother bite after bite of each meal.  Things had to change.  The love of mealtime and the love of food had to come back.  Brady needed to feel "normal" again.  We needed to feel "normal" again.  Eventually, we made some progress.  Brady started eating little (and I mean tiny) pieces of food, as we stared at him intensely.  I started feeding Brady again-first liquid type foods, but eventually pizza and hamburgers cut up into pieces I wasn't sure he could even taste.  We were feeling good about the progress he was making.  After some pretty intense OT, Brady learned to move his tongue and clear foods.  He started chewing his food and not just swallowing it whole.  He began to slow down and take pieces one at a time, instead of shoveling everything in at once.  He developed a sense of when to stop and take a drink to wash down his meals.  He has made significant progress with eating.  Most days, I feel good about mealtimes.  But there are days when I am around other three year olds, or worse one and two year olds, and I watch as their parents hand over crackers by the handful or a half of sandwich and sit back and relax as their children gobble down their food, without a second thought. I watch my two and three year old nephews tear into a whole pancake as I carefully cut Brady's pancakes into little, tiny bites that almost fall off the fork they are so small.  I watch my one year old niece hold a cracker in her hand and bite right into it without my sister-in-law thinking twice about it, as we still hold onto the crackers for Brady as he takes little nibbles.  I know that most parents do not think twice about food.  Mealtime is a time to reconnect with their families.  Eating is secondary.  For our family, mealtime is still a time of tension.  We have learned to let go a little bit.  We are learning to give Brady independence.  Molly has started to help me with breakfast in the morning-but mostly Brady handles breakfast on his own-oatmeal, yogurt and bananas.  Joe still handles chicken and hamburgers for the most part-but he doesn't have to run home every day to feed his son.  Brady's mom can do it now.We still have a love/hate relationship with food in our house.  I am not sure if that will ever change, but we have learned how to manage this challengning relationship.  Brady still smiles and laughs when the food is brought out,  he goes in the fridge on his own now and shows us what he wants.  He is a little pickier than he used to be and he is starting to have favorites....but he is still a good eater and has mastered using a spoon....we are working on the fork.  Food is an important part of our little boy's life and development...so much so that he has started using a word pretty regularly....cheese...and we love it!

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