Peanuts and Potato Chips

I will get to the peanuts and potato chips later as I wanted to do a general update first.

Its been very busy as our helper Remy went back to the Philippines for vacation two Thursdays ago. Jong was also away for a business trip last week so things were particularly challenging. Thank God my parents came to help and I was able to get someone to come in part time for 3 hours almost every day this past week. Things were particularly hard as Isaac missed Remy and his daddy so much. So Isaac became very clingy and whiny and his eating got even worse if one can imagine it getting any worse.

Isaac's food/oral aversions have had its ups and downs. I do notice that it gets a lot worse when he is not feeling 100% both physically or emotionally. Since he has had a cold and has been coughing for more than 2 months, feeding him has been extremely challenging.

We went to a birthday party earlier in the week and as everyone was getting ready to eat, I gave the lady sitting next to me a warning that my son has severe food aversions because I know I would have to wrestle with Isaac to get him to eat. So the lady said, my son is exactly the same. He won't eat anything! So we chatted a bit about it before her son came and plopped down on her lap and proceed to stuff a big thick cinnamon raisin bread stick, a number of mandarin orange slices and when the cake was served, the entire slice of birthday cake in his mouth. Boy, I guess some people don't have an idea of what food aversion really means. I have never been able to get even the smallest piece of the softest bread I tear out into Isaac's mouth. Nor any piece or part of a fruit (we figure out he is getting his fruits by drinking juice. haha). He doesn't even drink milk willingly. We have to chase him around and force him to drink it. He gags and throws up on mashed potatoes. So anyway, knowing he wouldn't eat anything there, I actually brought our own food - rice - something he almost would always eat at least a little bit. But he wouldn't eat one grain of rice this time. And when I was trying to get him to take one bite (and I was actually trying to be as discreet as possible), everyone actually stopped talking and stared at us for a while. So I decided at that point to just stop and let him go hungry and not create a spectacle. I asked some other micropreemie moms and I guess quite a few of them have the same problem and can't take their preemies out to eat. We can't even get Isaac to eat when we have company over.

So anyway, along with the food issues, we are also having speech issues. I guess its all oral related. His speech (what little he has) has been regressing. He is down to one word "car". Everything else is "keh" to him these days. The good thing is when Jong is traveling, he will run around the house and say "pa" a lot. We are pretty sure he is actually saying papa as he really only does his when Jong is away. He will also say "ma" or "oma" when he is really upset. We found a temporary speech therapist who can work with him during the month of July so hopefully we can start working on this and getting him to speak more soon.

He does understand a lot. He will get most things right if we ask him to point at things in books. He will also pick out the right index cards with pictures and stuff. He can recognize/pick out the basic colors, shapes, a lot of different kind of animals and every day objects, the numbers 1-10 and most of the alphabet. He seems to love learning and will pick up a book and point to things, or alphabets or numbers and will want us to say things out loud to him (by saying "keh" and if we don't do it, he will start yelling at us. LOL). So hopefully its just taking time for him to figure out how to form the words with his mouth and tongue.

So on to peanuts and potato chips. Well the bad news is Isaac is very allergic to peanuts. I first realized this earlier this week when I tried to give him a bowl of oatmeal with avocado and added 2 small teaspoons of peanut butter for the first time. This time it was a good thing he hates eating. He refused to eat after a few bites and broke out in hives and started rubbing his eyes like crazy shortly afterwards. We confirmed his allergy at his ped's office today when he was given a dab a peanut butter. This time his reaction was a lot worse and his face swelled up a lot. So we know for sure he is allergic to peanuts and will do the allergy blood test for him in a month to find out whether he has more food allergies. Again, I guess its a good thing we basically can't eat out with him and have to make his food special at home so we have a lot more control over what he eats. Also, although he puts every inedible thing in his mouth that he can get his hands on, he rarely puts edible things in his mouth. So I guess that is a good thing too.

We also discovered that he likes potato chips today. He started liking thin crisp crackers recently so we thought we would try giving him potato chips and he loves it. I guess he likes the crunch and probably the salt. But potato chips has potatoes and fatty oils in it so it made me happy. LOL.

Abigail is doing good. It turned out she has acid reflux and she has also been having some poop issues which has been causing some eating issues as well (her eating slows down a lot when she hasn't pooped for a few days). But she is basically doing well and is getting cuter each day.

Wow this got quite long and rambly so I will end my post here. Hopefully I can find time to post some pictures soon including the family portraits we took!

Sonia