I’ve posted the latest pictures until next week you can see them under Jade Pictures… after that they’ll be in their own little “March 2005” page.
This has been a big week!
We had our first real sitting last weekend.. then this week Theresa decided to give Jade some Cheerios to munch on, and munch she did!
Today, Theresa says she ate canned fruit for the first time too. Tree chopped it up small enough for her to swallow and she apparently loved it. She tried giving her a fresh banana yesterday but it was soundly rejected with much twisting of face and whining. So that will have to wait for another day.
It’s all quite exciting and I’m especially happy to see the light at the end of the tunnel in terms of her no longer needing the silly baby food in-a-bottle.
We weren’t feeding her “real” food before because we found that she couldn’t swallow it. She has such an incredibly strong gag reflex (because of the feeding tube when she was very very small) that any incling of a blockage in her throat results in her gagging and vomiting up her whole meal! I guess it’s good in a way, seems we don’t need to worry much about her choking on something… but it made introducing real food with any kind of texture pretty difficult.
The revelation came this week though when Theresa went to Google and searched out causes and strategies for this incredible gag reflex. She found out that premies often try to swallow “slimy” or really thick/chunky foods like baby food with meat or other things like that whole… without chewing or trying to break it down in their mouth somehow. And that obviously leads to choking and vomiting.
So! They say to give them harder foods… things that they are forced to recognize as chewable. Like Cheerios! That makes them chew… and the chewing makes sure that the food doesn’t make them choke. So we can feed her runny stuff… or chewable stuff.. but avoid things in the middle. WEIRD.
Oh well, hopefully now that she’s chewing she’ll get the hang of it and she’ll become more adept with the thicker food mixtures. Then we can really start giving her the good stuff!
Oh, and I almost forgot. She officially cut her 3rd tooth yesterday. It’s on the bottom again… on her right. We expect its’ counterpart on the left to appear shortly.
No sign from the soldiers on top though… strange.