Hear that?

That quiet chomping?

That’s the sound of the Quail eating solid foods!!!!! By herself!!!!

Chewing, chewing, chewing, swallowing, taking a drink, swallowing, flinging her cup to the side; first with abandon, then with a quick hand-off-to-the-other-side & mom-blocked-me-so-I-dodge-her-to-fling-it-to-the other side and then back to happily chewing.

More? She wants more? She signs eat! Maybe she signs more, but she prefers to sign eat. At the beginning of the meal I do a full prompt of her hand to her mouth to ask for more to eat, then as the meal and puffs go on I can cue her with a light touch to her wrist and she’ll do the follow through. Her and Zuzu have had many a Puff party in the last few weeks since this started. They sit down together on the floor each with a straw cup of kefir and a little plate of puffs or brown rice cereal and have a little tea party. It’s SO cute!

This has been a long time coming and still feels a little nervewracking to us. But the Quail has been hollering throughout feeding time lately and Monique had suggested if she had some food to feed herself between bites she might lay off of us a bit- and indeed it did the trick! We’ve now added a full spectrum of meltable foods to her diet and even risked some scrambled eggies. Yesterday Monique reminded me that we have a little hand-held foodnet that we could put some of what we are eating into and hand her so that she can reaccustom herself to food other than the standard grade orange or green offerings that her diet has flittered down to since weaning. So last night we started her on every preggos staples: pickles and curried potato salad! I know it sounds weird but a) it’s what we had in the fridge and b) we’ve been told that due to the low sensitivity issues highly flavored foods are more likely to be pleasing to her palette then ones that are more mild. She loved it! It gave me enough confidence to start offering the Stage 3 mixed textures to her- this gave a little pause, we did have a gag or two on the whole peas in it- but I think it was the issue of the mixed textures and it catching her by surprise. As long as we went slowly she was still open to it so we’ll proceed with caution.

I must say it’s hard to find a balance between sticking to a feeding protocol and knowing when to venture out and try the next level up. With Zuzu I found the path to solid foods incredibly nerve-wracking- she had no actual diagnosis but I was always weary of choking. Frankly I chickened out with most of those transitions and let the more experienced daycare teachers to the training since they were more comfortable with it. So when the Quail came along with bonafide, diagnosable issues with feeding- well let’s just say it amped my worry up about 1000%. So I need a little prodding to expand her horizon, but we’re doing it and she’s doing awesome!

And another little brag- with all the therapy the Quail gets- she comes by her pincer grasp naturally! We’ve worked little to none on enhancing this and the girl can rake a raisin like nobody’s business! Incidently- that development marker noted in the infamous What to Expect series has always given me pause about the rest of their wealth of information considering how sharp the learning curve would be to test your infant’s ability to rake a raisin since if she passes the test she’s probably well on her way to testing your recall on your infant CPR exam.