You Can't Fool Me!

I took Tyler to see a speech therapist yesterday. Mrs. Harriet is my friend Julie's mom, and she's a retired speech therapist who has training in helping children who have swallowing problems.

Tyler gags very easily, and when he does gag, he often throws up — not just a little bit but the entire contents of his stomach. He is 1 and he still eats mostly stage 2 foods and some stage 3 baby foods that are not very thick and don't have any pieces of pasta, rice, etc.

He's very hesitant about trying new foods, too, although he loves Cheerios, Gerber crackers and bites of my cereal bars.

So yesterday was a bad day for him (and me!). I made him take bites of textured baby foods so Mrs. Harriet could watch him gag. I fully expected him to throw up, but he didn't, although we could tell he was struggling to swallow.

After we finished with three or four bites, he refused to eat any more and he just sobbed in the highchair. So I tried to give him yogurt, which he loves, because I knew he was hungry. He wasn't interested in the yogurt so all he ate for lunch was oatmeal cookies and Cheerios (bless those General Mills people!).

His whole eating schedule was off and he was very suspicious when I put him in the highchair for the rest of the day.

We couldn't get him to eat last night, so we decided to give him yogurt (his favorite, remember) and more Cheerios for supper.

Because he'd already had some Cheerios, and because he refused yogurt earlier in the day, I told Brian to put half of the yogurt in a small tupperware container so we could save it if Tyler didn't want it.

Brian proceeded to feed Tyler out of the container that the yogurt comes in. Tyler was still suspicious, but he opened his mouth every time Brian said "yogurt."

Tyler finished off the first half of the yogurt and Brian grabbed the tupperware container with the rest of the yogurt.

Tyler didn't want anything to do with it. He would push the spoon away, even when Brian said, "yoguuuuurrrrrttttt."

I told Brian to pour it back in the original yogurt container. He looked at me like I was crazy, but he tried it. And Tyler promptly opened his mouth when he saw the spoon go into the yogurt container.