Feeding update, developmental therapy, and Abby’s tubes

Busy day today…

Hannah had her developmental therapy session today.  She absolutely loves Jenny, our therapist.  Jenny was so impressed that Hannah actually sat up and balanced on her butt for almost 20 minutes without falling.  My baby girl is getting the sitting thing down — she is even starting to put her hand out to balance if she falls, but that is something we need to work more on.  Hannah also showed off how she loves to stand (holding on to something) for a couple of minutes as well.  She gave us suggestions on working with her to get her knees into a crawling position as well as to continue working on the back-to-front rolling over.  I love working with her because she gives me suggestions that seem really easy to implement, and I do work with Hannah at least two to three times each day on her developmental therapy.  The success is starting to show!

As for eating, I replaced 2 ounces of water with 2 ounces of apple juice in 3 of Hannah’s formula bottles.  She had absolutely no problems with that.  We also put applesauce on her tray at dinner with us, and she just played around with it and the spoons & toys on her tray.  A bit of it got into her mouth, and she would give a weird face, but she didn’t completely freak out. 

Then, and this is big, we gave her a biter biscuit.  She was munching on that thing for about 10 minutes.  In and out.  She wasn’t really sure if she liked it, but she kept chewing on it.  She chews on everything, so this was a perfect idea.  I was staring at her, literally the entire time because I was afraid of choking.  But she was fine.  She only ended up eating maybe about 10% of it, but at least that is a start.  The funny thing was when she got a bigger piece, maybe about 1/3 of a cm, in her mouth, and she started screaming and crying.  She would not let it go into her mouth more! 

But thanks to so many of you, I got some wonderful suggestions that we are going to try out.  Thank you!

Last, and definitely not least, my dear Abigail.  It looks like she is going to have to have her third set of tubes put in.  One tube is basically almost out, but the other one is completely blocked and nonfunctional at this point.  Sadly, she still has middle ear fluid.  So, we are going to wait 3 more weeks and then make the decision.  I’m actually glad it isn’t right away because we just have so much going on with our trip to California for Passover and Hannah’s swallow study.