If you would have told me 10 months ago that this little guy would be drinking from a cup, eating solids like there’s no tomorrow, and actually enjoying it, I would not have believed you. Jacob’s journey with food has been a winding one. He was champ of a breastfeeder from the very beginning – like, one hour after birth, nursing like he just knew what to do. But that very quickly turned into breastfeeding for more than just nutrition.
I knew from about the time that he was 4 weeks old that something wasn’t quite right. He rarely spit up, was gaining weight well, and wasn’t really gassy, so he didn’t fit the classic signs of reflux, but I knew something was off. He would nurse incessantly. If he was awake, he was nursing. And that’s to be expected to some extent in the first few weeks, especially for a baby who was 10 lb 6 oz at birth, but it was more than that. He nursed so much because that was the only way he wasn’t screaming.
Jacob truly spent the first 5-6 months of his life in some form of discomfort. When he was 9 weeks old, he had been having some trouble with feeding – because he nursed so much, I was making a ton of milk, and I have a pretty aggressive let-down, so he would get a little flooded and had some trouble keeping up. He would choke a bit and sometimes take a minute to recover. And then he choked for real.
It happened over a period of about 24 hours. He choked once and recovered. He choked again and took a little longer to recover. Then he just looked off. His color was pretty grey, he looked kind of dazed, and his eyes weren’t focusing in more than just a newborn hazy way. One afternoon in July, I brought him in to nurse him and his breathing became so slow and shallow, I had to keep my hand on my back the whole time he was feeding. My mama senses had been telling me something was wrong, and this was the final straw.
I called our pediatrician who sent us to our local Emergency Department. The doctors and nurses there were amazing. They got him on the monitors right away, did a full exam to make sure his airway wasn’t compromised, and kept the tone of the room as calm as possible. After a few hours and some evaluation, the ER doctor decided the safest option would be to transfer Jacob by ambulance to Boston Children’s Hospital for a full work-up and extended monitoring. We spent the next 48 hours ruling out the biggest and scariest possibilities.
After Jacob’s admission to the hospital, we were discharged with a “well, we know what is’t not, but we still don’t know what it is” which, as a mom, is not the most reassuring answer. Over the next few weeks and months, we had appointments with ENT, Allergy, and Gastroenterology to determine that Jacob has a combination of things that attributed to his feeding issues. ENT determined that he has laryngomalacia and silent reflux, which was causing him to aspirate when he ate so he was getting milk in his lungs. Allergy and GI tag-team diagnosed him with a cow’s milk protein allergy and FPIES, which stands for Food Protein Enterocolitis Syndrome and is basically like celiac to a whole bunch of different foods.
After Jacob’s FPIES diagnosis, we worked on introducing solids really carefully. He already had a negative association with feeding because of his discomfort from the reflux and then the string of allergic reactions of intense vomiting, so we moved slowly. He eventually got more comfortable with things he liked, but we had about two months of time where he definitely needed more than breastmilk but couldn’t really feed himself yet and he hated purees. That’s where these fun little gadgets come in!
These Choo Mee baby spoons are perfect for independent babies who like to feed themselves. It’s basically a spoon with no bowl, so babies can dip it in something of a puree consistency and feed themselves before they have the dexterity to use a spoon. Then, when they get a little bit more dexterity, these GrabEase utensils are great for learning to use a fork and spoon without the possibility of gagging. Even though Jacob never loved purees, he does love applesauce. When I give him an applesauce pouch, I put one of these Choo Mee pouch tops on it. He has to bite down on it a little bit to get the applesauce out, so there’s no squeezing baby mush all over the place!
Finding a cup that works for Jacob was hard, too. We’ve had to thicken his water with soy yogurt or applesauce since we figured out he was aspirating, but he never ever took a bottle so he wasn’t used to the traditional sip cup method of drinking through a spout. We start out with these Mama Bear weighted straw cups and he took to them right away! I really like them because the handles are so easy for little ones to hold, but the thickened water was really hard to clean out of the thin straw. So we’ve been using these Munchkin weighted straw cups for the past two months or so, and Jacob is doing great with them. It’s wide enough for the thickened water and now drinking Ripple milk through them, too!
I know now from experience how challenging it can be to have a baby with belly troubles, feeding challenges, and discomfort that no one can figure out. To any mama who’s up for hours every night bouncing a baby because upright is the only position they’ll sleep, or cleaning projectile baby vomit off of the wall, or explaining to their toddler why their baby sibling needs you all the time, it does get better. I promise.
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