feeding therapy/other bits and bites.

so, as you may or may not know, we've been doing the feeding therapy for meg in cleveland the past few weeks.  and really, it's been going swimmingly.

one of the things that i've been saying the past few months about upping the textures in her mouth (which has really equated into just giving her bigger chunks of things to see if she can swallow them), is that it doesn't really matter how big the chunks that she swallows get... the bigger problem is that she doesn't chew and she doesn't use her tongue to manipulate anything around in her mouth.  when i expressed this as a concern at our initial appointment, i wanted them to give me some strategies for getting the girl to chew.

we have been doing some oral exercises and massage, getting her used to the feeling of having something in places she's not accustomed to.  she struggled with it at first... and not that she's not struggling with it now... but she's starting to "get it".  i think that things are slowly starting to come together.

friday, we were about to leave for our appointment, and since it takes us a little over an hour to get there, i wanted her fussiness in the car to not be related to hunger, so i gave her a few containers of food to tide her over till our arrival.  lo and behold, she gets fussy about 45 minutes into the ride, and my usual arsenol of toys and fun kid cd's wasn't doing the trick, so i gave her some milk.  she went into our appt burping!  i thought for sure it would be disaster, with her refusing to eat from being full.

we got right in, and immediately started with oral exercises, then chunks of strawberries.  the therapist was squishing them onto her side teeth to make her have to manipulate them to swallow.  she did great!!  then came the true test: one inch pieces of spaghetti with minimal sauce.  please understand that this girl will not eat unless puree accompanies almost every bite.  i thought for sure that she'd have a major bout with throwing up when the spaghetti went in.  i was doing my usual... entertaining her to take her mind off of eating... making her favorite stuffed animal dance to music and play peekaboo.  she ate a whole ounce of spaghetti pieces!  chewed them, even!  and laughing in between while watcing her octopus dance!!  it was a modern-day miracle, really.  and truly a vision that i had to witness to believe.

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so i was recounting the story of the spaghetti to a friend, and telling her how all i do lately is seek this level of "fine-ness".  what is that, exactly?  you know, maybe not where i truly believe that everything is fantastic and great and dreamy, but where things are just fine.  and lately, with such slow meg-progress, it's been harder to pick myself back up to fine-ness when the lows are so low.  but i truly believe that God gives me these small little indicators that, indeed, everything is fine.  will be fine.  has been fine.  and never necessarily on my timeline, but definitely on the one that works... which would be meg's.

so needless to say, i feel like i've been coming up out of the doom and gloom that was april and may, and it's getting good.  things are never exactly the way that i picture they will be (are things ever really that way?  not too often, for sure), but somehow, they are good and they are working and they are just the way they are supposed to be.

things are fine!  the girl can eat spaghetti!!