Food therapy follow up

I just thought I should give some follow up info on our experience with Food or Feeding Therapy.  Ana is doing great.  She had two sessions with a professional therapist.  Food/Feeding Therapists are typically speech therapists with a specialty in feeding therapy.

After my last blog entry Food therapy session #2 (http://missymaydunn.blogspot.com/2011/05/food-therapy-session-2.html) Ana has really started to love raspberries and she even prefers them over strawberries or any other fruit.  She still likes almonds and has tried many different kinds of nuts.  Her favorite are probably cashews.  She has tried Broccoli, Cauliflower and Asparagus and she likes them.  We had to go through the same process of introducing raw broccoli and cauliflower and now she eats sugar snap peas and different colors of bell peppers.

I wouldn't quite say that she is a whole new person when it comes to her attitude toward food, but she has made huge improvements.  She will eat a bagel with cream cheese on it now and I gave it to her with sliced apples a few weeks ago and she tried taking a bite of each one and chewing them in her mouth together and she liked that so she always likes them together.  I hope that this progresses into her eating a sandwich someday, but she still doesn't like to mix foods too much yet.  I gave her a bread roll with a slice of cheese on it today and without complaining she just took the cheese out and ate them both separately.  

We added trying new foods to her chore list.  She gets a sticker on a chart when she does certain things and she gets to pick a toy out of a bag when the chart is full.  This has helped a little, but following the process that the therapist taught us for introducing new foods has helped the most.  First we play with and touch the new food.  We talk about the temperature and texture.  Then we smell it.  Then we put our finger on our lip and lick our lips or on our tongue to see what the taste is like.  Then we lick the food and maybe try a small bite.  Then she will try a real sized bite and decide if she likes it.  Most of the time when Ana tries a new food she will only take one bite of it, but the next time we try it she will take another bite and skip the whole process of touching and smelling.  We're getting there.  Just wanted to share some hope with anyone who might be struggling with the same thing since blog reading was how I discovered food therapy myself.  Good luck!