Food Therapy

Okay, so a few weeks ago a gal in my MOPS group mentioned that her friend had their kid in food therapy.  I'm sure those of you who know Ana could imagine how my eyes lite up.  Brilliant!  Jory and I talked about it and decided we should look into it.  I have had many suggestions from friends and family who want to help, but please believe me when I say: we have tried everything!

I finally reached a point where I decided to give up.  Ana is a good kid.  A really good kid.  She shares, she is well mannered.  She doesn't whine as much as she used to ;-)  She is smart and loves to learn.  She is creative and developing well in all areas so why fight about it?  Well, we'd like for her to be healthy and we'd like for her to weigh more than her younger sister, but I'm not sure it's worth the headache.

Finally, this morning I had time to look into Food Therapy a bit more.  I've been online a good part of the morning reading and reading.  I emailed my friend and our pediatrician to see if I could find out more information.  I read one blog that talked about how the mom played with Kebler Elf Cookies with her son and got him to eat a tootsie roll and called that progress.  I totally understood where she was coming from.  I'm sure some of you can't understand why we call tootsie rolls progress, but it can be.  While on vacation we bought some Breyers Oreo Ice cream and Ana cried.  She likes white ice cream without stuff in it.  I showed her the box and explained that it was white ice cream with oreos in it.  She likes them both and now she can try them together.  She sat at the table until it was melted and then finally she tried some.  Now imagine how hard it is to get her to eat broccoli.

So after some motivational reading we came upstairs to have a snack.  I had no intentions of starting therapy and I'm still looking for a professional, but I couldn't help myself.  We had green apples (ana loves) oranges (ana will eat sometimes if all of the white is peeled off and there is no sign of seeds) and I had some almonds and pecans as well.  Then I started thinking about therapy and what I would try to get Ana to eat.  Then I started thinking of playing with food and wondered how I could do that.  I'm just not creative.  The only thing I could think of was building a lego city and using broccoli as trees.  Pathetic I know.  But then I started blowing on my almonds and watching them roll around the table.  The girls thought I was hilarious.

We blew almonds back and forth.  It's more difficult than it looks so I suggested to Ana that maybe we could use our tongues to push the almonds around.  She watched me for a minute and then tried it.  I asked her how it felt on her tongue.  She said, "good."  Then I cracked one open with my teeth and had her feel how smooth it was with her finger.  Then she asked me if I could take off the brown part so she could eat it.  I tried not to get too excited, but she ate almonds!  Do you know how hard it is to peel and almond?  Thankfully she slowly adapted to the brown part and started eating the outside too.  I still had to crack them open so she could see the white part, but progress has been made!