The Texture Of Things

Update below.

The last few days of my life with my daughter are evaporating before my eyes. There just isn’t enough time and she needs me so much right now. Of course, she needs me so much because of the impending change, but that’s logic and right now, logic plays a role in the chorus in this production while emotions take center stage.

Going to bed has been ever harder for the tot in the last half a year. Once she had gotten a good routine down for night-night, she’s almost always gone to bed easily. Some age-appropriate nonsense, but all do-able. The occasional struggle. The once-in-a-blue-moon stay awake for over an hour in there, cripes, will she just go to sleep already? Then she hit the age where imagination gets unwieldy and night shadows started to scare her. We developed a few coping strategies (an LED flashlight that can stay on all night and not get hot, a “game” of spraying monster repellent anywhere she deems necessary, and a reminder that monsters are in our imagination so the repellent really works), but those are not enough right now.

She has a new routine of getting very sad when it’s time to turn on the flashlight and turn out the story-reading lamp. She says she’s afraid. Afraid of what? I ask. She cannot tell me. We spray for monsters and I go to the door, where I’m hit with a long series of delays. “Wait, mama! Don’t go! Wait! I want to tell you something.”

“Tell me one thing,” I say.

She hems and haws and makes up a nonsensical tidbit. I keep my response short and to the point and turn to leave.

“Don’t go!” She closes her eyes and half-cries. “I’m having a bad dream!”

“You’re not asleep, so it cannot be a bad dream. Tell me what you are thinking about.”

“I’m scared!”

“Of what?”

But she can never name what she is scared of. She just wants to keep me there.

A week or two ago, I introduced an incentive program to reduce the incredible stalling and resistance that now accompanies the getting-ready-for-bed routine. If she could do it all and do it cooperatively, I’d lie down in bed with her. I knew this would be a great temptation since a sleeping companion is what she craves during the nights when she has nightmares. It worked a few times, but lately we are back to the resistance, so the first threat of loss of privilege is to lose the incentive. After that, I take away one story at a time, based on how much time she’s wasted. Last night, I saw that I might have the consequences weighted backwards.

She refused to get her jammies on repeatedly, until she lost the privilege of my lying down with her. When it came time for me to leave the room, we had the customary “I’m scared”/”Of what?” exchanges, and I told her to lie down and think happy, sleepy thoughts and I would be back in five minutes to check on her. (I always go back, sometimes in ten minutes, and she is always asleep, so it’s not like she’s having a simple case of the “can’t-turn-my-brain-off-for-sleep”.)

At about seven minutes post-promise, I went back there. I opened the door, and she didn’t stir. I waited to listen to her breathe, but it was so quiet that I couldn’t hear her. I saw her lovey positioned to fall off the bed, so I risked it and went all the way in to her bed.

When I moved her lovey to a more secure position, the tot grasped her more firmly and muttered in her sleep, “scared…. scared…”. Then she opened her eyes a bit, saw me, and sat up.

I couldn’t just leave, so I climbed in bed with her and told her to lie down, close her eyes, and keep breathing. How could I not?

I lay there while she drifted back into sleep and it dawned on me that the reason she cannot name what she is scared of is because she is scared of the unknown. But she’s four, so she doesn’t have the words for that yet. Crap, I’m thirty-five and I can’t always put my finger on it.

I lay there and thought about the presidential debate on tv in the other room. I thought about a baby who is coming, whom we don’t know, whom I can’t love until I meet him, and I thought about the world falling to pieces in a giant clusterfuck made worse by politics and who’s going to be left holding the remains? I thought about all the things that are going to happen and we just can’t know how hard it’s going to be until they get here, and I thought, I’m scared too, baby. I’m scared too.

I am holding on to the few days we have left as a family in this shape, waiting both eagerly and apprehensively for the change that is coming. It is a purgatory I never could have imagined until now.

Update.
I wrote this before anyone else in the house got up. When the tot got up, I asked her if she remembered waking up or me lying down in bed with her the night before, and – for better or for worse – she did not.

The following is a list of foods I want to eat after this pregnancy and its attending diabeetus are over. In no particular order.

* Peanut Buster Parfait from Dairy Queen; would also accept that one sundae from Ritters with pecans and caramel
* Sweet and Sour Chicken from our local Chinese food joint or the one from my home town; would also accept Sesame Chicken from our second favorite local Chinese joint
* Ground beef and cheese burritos (with sides of beans and cole slaw) from HG’s favorite Mexican restaurant, with salsa
* Hungry Hippies pizza (pepperoni, green pepper, and onion with butter crust) and Three Cheeser bread
* Sugar-full Lemonade; would also accept orange juice
* Hi-test Mocha with whipped cream and chocolate sprinkles; would also accept other flavors but nothing sugar-free
* Onion Rings from our local hotel bar, with dipping sauce
* Wine
* Pie
* IHOP

Okay, let’s talk about these last three.
Wine: I have found that I can make a beefy spaghetti sauce that, in combination with whole wheat pasta, does not make my blood sugar soar. But! No garlic bread or Chianti. That just sucks. I mean, I just want one glass of wine. (Here’s me cry-babying about it: a-WAAH!)

Pie: Let me make this as clear as possible. I DON’T EVEN LIKE PIE. Some fruit pie, about once a year or every other year, is fine. I do prefer berries, but at this point, if someone offered me a slice of apple pie with the assurance I could eat the whole thing while my pancreas cooperated and my placenta looked the other way, OMFG, I’d even eat apple pie.

IHOP: For years, literally years, I have longed for an IHOP close to my home. Then? IHOP waited until I was pregnant and on the doorstep of teh pregnancy diabeetus before they opened one. Rat Bastards. So now, I’ve been salivating for months over the thought of going to IHOP as soon as I can travel out the house to eat one of everything off the menu, including pancakes, WHICH I DON’T EVEN LIKE. Waffles and French Toast, on the other hand, I love, and I am so totally going to eat those. Totally.

omg, i’m so hungry right now.

Edited to add:
OMG, HOW COULD I FORGET?!
*Bonus food – cider mill cider and spice donuts from ANY-FREAKIN-WHERE

Have you seen this? It’s a retro, 50′s style diner/kitchen play set for the stylish and young at heart.

If we didn’t already own a play kitchen, I’d pawn something to buy this for the tot.

Srsly. “…[A] bell lets the server know when kitchen orders are ready for serving”?
So. Much. Awesome.

Recently, I took a peek at the search phrases that have led people to this blog, and one stood out to me. It regarded a small child’s aversion to the texture of sand. When I read it, I remembered a picture I have on my phone of the tot, playing happily in the sand pit at our local park for the first time. I recall the surge of happiness – sheer glee – I had that she was sitting in the sand and was happy. It was the month she turned two, and I had all but given up hope that she’d ever tolerate this activity that – it seemed – every other child in the world enjoyed and every other parent in the world took for granted. Ah, the relaxing moments sitting on a bench in the shade while the children scoop and dump and shape and smear and dig in the cool sand at the park. Would I ever get to be that parent? I wondered.

Seeing the search phrase popped me back to that time and I realized that I’m not sure I’ve fully appreciated the 30 minutes I can now sit while the tot plays in her sand cart this summer. How did we get here?

Whereas many parents can simply plunk their kid down in the sand pit and watch as the child seeks more information about this new tactile sensation, we did not enjoy such instantaneous success. Sand was just not appealing to her. Too gritty, perhaps? Too wobbly under her feet? Too unpredictable? I mean, this stuff gets everywhere! When I’d take her to the park’s sand pit, until that day in late June, she did not want to walk on it, touch it, play in it, explore it. No no no, no no no bad.

So, looking back, I have some observations about what worked to get her past that early aversion to sand.

First, she had had some positive experiences with sand the summer before. (Before this, her only exposure to sand was at the park.) We were driving to a friend’s cabin in another state, and along the way we stopped at a state park beach. The tot walked in the sand with her daddy and eventually sat in the sand and pawed through it to examine the occasional tiny shell. What was different about that sand? Several things come to mind:

* the beach sand had a much smoother feel to it (i.e., it was less gritty), due probably to smaller overall size of the grains
* the beach sand had a fairly even consistency, in that it was sand and a few small shells, unlike the sand at the park, which has lots of rocks, twigs, leaves, etc., in it
* the temperature of the beach sand was warm, but not hot, unlike the sand at the park, which is cool (and the tot did not like cold)
* we all felt relief to be out of the car – it was a looonng drive – so we were craving different sensory input
* the beach population was less dense than the park is, so we could easily have our own space and ignore other patrons and focus solely on our own experience (and the tot did/does sometimes get overwhelmed by throngs of people)

What I take away from this is that to have success introducing a texture-averse kid to sand is to back up and see the whole scene. What else could be raising the child’s anxiety about the situation? If you can control or change that variable, will the child be more open to the texture?

Second, the day the tot sat in the sand pit and had fun, I had lowered my expectations. I didn’t expect her to play in the sand for more than a few seconds, so I let her keep her socks and shoes on, in spite of the general dread I had about getting the sand off of her when it came time to leave. How much sand could it really be if she was going to hit the sand and immediately bail? Not much, right?

Ha ha ha – WRONG. (Given the success, that’s all right.)

I’m sure it was more than just one thing that led to success, but I can’t discount the possibility that having her feet and some of her legs covered made a difference. Instead of having to manage the sensory input from hands, arms, legs and feet, she only needed to focus on tactile input from the skin on her hands and arms. (And as I think about it, judging from the picture, I’ll bet it was not breezy that day, so that was one less tactile input she needed to cope with.)

What I take away from this is a question I should ask myself more often: what coping mechanisms can we offer to help the child manage on her/his own? If the child becomes overwhelmed by too much of a tactile experience, how can we block some of it in order to prevent the child from shutting down completely? In this case, the solution was – in part – to cover more of the body. Fine. If the tot wants to keep her shoes on in the sand box, I can live with that if the outcome is she plays happily and has a healthy experience. And what I’ve discovered in the last two years is that if I grant her the choice to keep shoes on or take them off in the sand, she will take them off once she’s had a chance to relax and get into what she’s doing. The shoes help her cope at the beginning, and when she no longer needs the shield, she will set it aside. Nowadays, it doesn’t take very long to get to this point.

At occupational therapy, the OT uses a similar coping strategy to get the tot to eat frozen g0gurts. The tot does want to lick it and play with it, but she does not want to hold something that cold. The strategy: wrap a napkin around it. Same thing goes for foods like string cheese. When the OT first offered her string cheese, the tot wanted to join the OT in playing with it, but she didn’t want to hold it. Fine. The OT wrapped a napkin around it, and the tot was no longer troubled by the feel of the cheese. Since then, she will pick the cheese right up without the napkin. (Tasting it is an entirely other matter, however.)

One key thing to remember about exposing a child to a challenging thing in small doses might be that we cannot always control the physical size of the dose; rather, it might be making the dose seem more manageable, or smaller. Time is one such constraint we can (often) control in this way. As in, “Hey, here’s a sand pit. Check it out. Oooh, sand. Okay, you’re done? Fine, we’ll move on to the slides and visit the sand later.” I find if I allow the tot this much control, she will return to it in time, more open to the sensory experience. On the other hand, although the exposure doesn’t last long, the overall desensitization takes a while because the exposures must take place across time.

So, even though the beach was not a small place, by any stretch of the imagination, the dose (challenge) was smaller there for the tot than at the local sand pit because certain variables like texture consistency, temperature, and spatial pressure did not push the tot’s tolerance as far as the park experiences had.

In case a parent of a sand-averse child happens to find this, there are two other points not related to dose size that I want to mention here. The first is the importance of lowered expectations and the second is the importance of role models.

I can’t say for certain that the day I let go of my desire for the tot to like playing in sand played any part in her moving through her issues, but it certainly made it easier for me. And a more relaxed mommy makes for a happier family. At least, in this house I think that’s true. But to let go of that desire I had to accept – truly, deep down, accept – that it’s okay for her to not like a sandbox. In fact, I often have to remind myself that not everyone likes everything. Some stuff she’s just not going to enjoy. Okay. That’s fine. I admit that many of my expectations for her are based solely on cultural expectations – like, all kids like pizza, or all kids fingerpaint. You know what? When it comes to kids, there is no “all.”

As for role models, I cannot ignore the positive influence our next-door neighbor children have had on the tot, particularly in the area of sand play. They have a sandbox in their yard, and the kids in that family are not at all bothered by messes, sand in every crevice, or things mixed in with the sand. They have acted as ambassadors, in a way, demonstrating how kids deal with and enjoy sand, even what to do when playing in the sand just isn’t fun anymore.

Would role models alone have made the difference for the tot? No, I don’t think so, just as I find certain advice for parents of picky eaters incomplete. Hey – you might be able to put a new food in front of your children ten or twelve times and find your children will try it and, if the heavens are smiling on you, decide they like it, but that is not my kid. And when I tell you I do it and it’s not enough for my kid – she just needs more exposures and sometimes that doesn’t even matter – don’t smile, nod, and tell me it’ll happen because a kid won’t starve herself, because that is statistically untrue. There are some kids – about 4% – who will starve themselves, however inadvertently. [scroll down past bullet list.]

In the meantime, I’ll keep doing what I’m doing. Expose, expose, expose. When something is so hard that she shuts down, contain the challenge and help the tot manage and cope, then let her do it herself and on her own terms. And measure the successes we have with a smile.

No, I have not had the baby yet. That is not the close call.

This morning, the tot stayed home from preschool with the ever-beloved pink-eye. While we were sorting laundry in my bedroom, I noticed a gift box I had forgotten about. In it was a blanket and woobie for the baby. The tot saw the woobie and wanted to claim it. I reminded her it was for the baby and besides, she already had two identical woobies from when she was a baby. I fetched* them from the closet and reclaimed the new ones.

On an aside, I happened to mention that I want to have the blanket and woobie embroidered with the baby’s name, and instantly the tot determined that her woobie needs her name on it.

:sigh:
Of course, child – you can have your name on your woobie, too.

(Look, it’s not like I’m paying for it – my mom does it – so all’s equitable in love and embroidery, in this house anyway.)

So, because my mom was stopping by for other stuff today and because my four-year-old has a one-track mind (she gets it from her father or she’s 4, I’m not sure which plays a stronger role in this) and because I’m just trying to get every loose end tied up before the baby comes, I met my mother at the door with the woobies and blanket for names. I was all, Please take them TODAY. NO WAITING ALLOWED.

Cue HG’s scream of despair.

Why despair? Because we have an agreement that we will not reveal the newbie’s name until said newbie is born.

Happily, however, I had a moment of clarity and did not give the baby’s blanket and woobie to my mother. As a matter of fact, I believe I said, “Oh. I can’t give you these yet because I’m not telling you the name.”

She was, to say the very very least, bummed that I didn’t slip up.** But, for now anyway, our secret remains safe.

Whew.

*Is it just me, or does it seem like the past participle for “fetch” should be “fought”? Just me? I thought so.

**Why do we have this policy? Because the people in our life are relentlessly critical people who take every chance they can get to tell a pair of parents to be why the name they’ve chosen is terrible and why they must change it to – and then they provide a list of “acceptable” names. Keeping the name a secret until the child’s birth does not, as we learned with the tot, prevent all the mean and hurtful statements about the name in question, but it does make it harder to fall prey to their demands to change it to – oh god, anything but that. I highly recommend the method, but I do caution that it doesn’t prevent every possible complaint.

The up side to seeing approximately one hundred different doctors during this pregnancy is that I know I’m well-watched. Being watched so carefully calms me because if something starts to go wrong, odds are good someone will catch it more quickly than if I were not required to check in, say, forty times a week. This is important to me since had it not been for a non-stress test gone bad, the tot could have easily been a stillborn. And it was coincidence that I was even there for the NST, having been told earlier by the specialists at the hospital to go home and enjoy some good old fashioned bedrest. It was a “what the hell?” moment when I decided to go ahead and do the NST, seeing as how I was there and already scheduled for it. I mean, I could go home and enjoy that bedrest just as well in about an hour, right? So why not?

Egad, man. Talk about luck.

The down side to seeing approximately one hundred different doctors is that none of them agree on anything. Heck, ask just one of them what they believe are the three highest priorities for an obese woman with gestational diabetes. Go on. Ask one. My primary OB told me the following at my 10-week check up:
*Keep your weight gain down to 10-15 pounds total
*Keep your blood sugars under control, starting by following a diabetic diet (but moving to insulin, if required)
*But, don’t diet or restrict your food intake because you have to feed the baby

Okay, let’s try again, Doc. How about two out of three? No? What do you mean, “No, all three are equally important”?

Sweet Jebus, have you seen how many calories a pregnant chick is supposed to eat? Even for an obese woman, the recommended diet is 2200 calories. 2200! Who eats that much?! But I’m not supposed to gain more than 15 pounds?

What-Ever.

According to the Mayo Clinic, here is how the weight a woman gains during pregnancy breaks down:
* Baby: 7 to 8 pounds
* Larger breasts: 1 to 3 pounds
* Larger uterus: 2 pounds
* Placenta: 1 1/2 pounds
* Amniotic fluid: 2 pounds
* Increased blood volume: 3 to 4 pounds
* Increased fluid volume: 2 to 3 pounds
* Fat stores: 6 to 8 pounds

(For the record, mah bay-bee is on track to weigh about 7.5 pounds at birth.)

So, erase the fat stores – I’ve got that covered – and we’re talking about 18.5 to 23.5 pounds. If I’m only supposed to gain 10-15 pounds, but growing a baby requires roughly 20, I find myself a little confused about how the medical community defines “Don’t Diet While Pregnant.”

Big, dumb jerks.

So, when I met the dietitian, I asked her opinion: which 2 of 3 seemed the most important to her? She paused not at all and said, “Forget about the weight gain. Feed your body, feed the baby, worry about weight loss after the baby is here.” I decided right then that I love her, and I tossed all expectations of keeping my weight down out the window.

And this is the part you’ve been waiting for. So far, my net weight gain is 6 pounds. Six. I was up eight, but then I lost two pounds in two weeks.

FTW?

For reference, when the tot was born at 34.5 weeks, I had gained 16 pounds but lost 5 in the few days right before she was born. Currently, I’m 37.5 weeks, and I’ve gained about what I normally pack on over a weekend when I’ve made Christmas cookies. (I get weighed again tomorrow, so we’ll see how my eating like a maniac this last week has affected my poundage.) What did I do? I ignored the doctor, listened to the dietitian, walked on my treadmill a bunch, and resolved to consider my weight at check up a non-issue, like the pee test for protein. It’s either bad or it isn’t, and I’m not worrying about it until red flags start flying up.

So far, so good.

Six pounds. Really? I know – I surprised myself too.

When I was pregnant with the tot, I was diagnosed with Pregnancy Diabeetus. I had to go on a special diet and I had to check my blood sugar four times a day. I think I started this around 25 weeks and did it until she was born, so – what is that? 10 weeks?

Ten weeks of finger pokes. Seventy days of finger pokes. Two hundred eighty finger pokes. Roughly. Because who’s counting?

Courtesy of HG’s job, I had some supah-awesum health insurance, but it would not cover Diabeetus testing supplies. Figures. So, I went to my pharmacy counter, showed them the glucometer the dietitian had given me. In the little black case was the finger-poker-thing. (Sadists and those in the medical community call them “lancing devices”, I believe.) They looked it over and said, “Here is what you need,” and they pushed a box of test strips and a box of lancets across the counter at me.

I had no idea about the wide array of products available for finger poking, so I accepted the name brand lancets, paid the fortune that they cost, and went home to test my blood sugar.

Let me take this moment to clarify my state of mind at the time. I was bent on doing exactly what the dietitian told me to do for the sake of mah bay-bee. When she said, “Set the lancet depth at 5 or 6,” I did it. I set it at 5 and proceeded to suffer as the narrow lancets pounded deep into my flesh.

By the time the tot was born (mercifully early, if you ask my hands), my fingertips were freckled with small red dots and they felt like I had gotten them caught in a meat grinder. Both the left and right sides of all four fingers and one thumb on my left hand were abused to the point that at least once a day I tried to do the blood test left-handed in order to give my right hand fingers a taste of the torture. I developed some serious empathy for my husband’s grandmother, who tests her blood 4-6 times a day on her papery-skinned fingers. Oy, the poor woman.

Cue the passage of time and the change of insurance companies. For those of you not in the know, diabeetus testing supplies are expensive and are, at least in the States, quite a market. I mean, have you seen the 800 glucometer commercials that run daily on just about any television channel? Not to mention the radio ads and magazine ads and – oh my god the money the companies spend on advertising. Markup on test strips must be all right.

But! But this time, my joe-schmoe insurance covers testing supplies! Hooray!

And then the pharmacy filled the prescription with generic lancets.

Anyone who wants to say that generics and name brands are the same needs to take a look at these things. No picture I take of them does them any justice. The gauge on the name brand lancet is probably something like 1000 and the gauge on the generic is, like, 8. The night I used the first one, I yelled back at the “lancing device”. I told HG it felt like getting hit by shrapnel, AND I MEANT IT.

But there I was. I had paid for them. Well, I had paid the copay and I sure as heck wasn’t going to drop a single dime more on these miserable things because I am determined this diabeetus is a temporary condition, and I am nothing if not a cheapskate. (Do you hear me, pancreas? TEMPORARY.) So I had to figure out how to keep my fingers from turning into ground beef again, especially since I am also determined to get to full-term this time. The first logical step was to dial back the “lancing device.”

I dialed it back and back, and with some experimentation, I think I’ve found the perfect balance. The lancet pops forward juuuuuust enough that it feels like it’s actually bouncing off my skin, and about 98% of the time, it makes a hole that is, with a squeeze, big enough to produce enough blood for the test.

So successful am I that I often can’t tell or remember which finger I poked last.

And so the moral of the story is to not let cheap materials get you down. Cheap materials can help you find agency in a situation that is, for the most part, out of your control. They can teach you to think more critically about the instructions handed down to you by The Man. They can end up being more worth the money than those pesky name brand, high-fashion ones.

Awesome.

I haven’t posted a lot about being pregnant (or about anything lately, really), and that’s been mostly out of being busy and in denial. Busy: I’ve been getting stuff ready, taking care of the tot, nesting, etc. Denial: I’ve been trying to focus on the tot in these last few months, weeks, days of being a three-person family and I’ve spent hardly any time navel gazing, which is about all I did the first go around. (Ask HG. He’ll tell you that my primary response to “What’d ya do today?” when I was pregnant with the tot was “Gestate. You?”) The denial has been easy, since the tot is a busy, active child with a schedule outside of this house and family. (Dance, preschool, OT. Oh, I need a nap just thinking about it all.)

Still, it’s hard. And I don’t really mean the heartburn, the diabetes, the not-being-able-to-pick-anything-up-off-the-floor, the ligament pain. Yeah, that sucks, but really, it’s harder to sit here and not wonder what exactly I’ve done to my happy little family of three. Hard to sit here and wonder how the next few months are going to play out and simply not know. Hard to sit here and not wonder about how I’ll manage or if I’ll somehow find a deeper level of energy inside my carcas to pull me through during the times when I don’t have help. (There will be help, right?) (Egad, don’t answer that. I’m not sure I want to know.)

But there’s not much time left for wondering or worrying, for better or for worse. My due date is October 5, but because of the diabeetus, the docs want me to deliver a week before that. I’ve known this all along, but now that it’s close, it feels weird. This Friday, I’ll go to my next doctor’s appointment and have to negotiate a day for the baby to be born. In no way does this feel normal. Perhaps this is just the point on the path where, although I’ve bought in to a medical model of birth (for me), I’m keeping one foot on the natural model’s path. Babies come when they come, don’t they? Why should I even expend the energy to construct an argument for when this baby should come? There is no logic that can carry that argument. But I will have to choose, or have the doctor choose for me, and that will be that.

I don’t know what my point is here. I guess I’m just saying that my bags are packed and I’m as ready as anyone ever can be. So if you ask me what I did today, my answer is the same as yesterday’s: just gestatin’.

Here. Let me share the source of my pain…

www.befunky.com

and a sample…

It seems kind of unfair to the tot that I haven’t written any updates on her progress with textures here on the blog, a blog whose purpose was designed around such updates. I should rectify that.

Way back in the day (like, April or May of this year?), I took the tot for an evaluation by an Occupational Therapist. This was not the first time we had been to this center. About a year before, I took the tot for an evaluation for Sensory Integration – an eval the tot pretty much passed. The OT indicated she had some delay in Gross-Motor development and, yes, some tactile hypersensitivity and auditory hyposensitivity. Basically, yeah, eating is a problem, she’s a klutz, and she’s the kind of kid/person who loves music and needs it in the background all the time to help her focus. We all know a person like this or close to it, right?

At the time of the SI eval, they recommended weekly therapy, including body brushing (still not sure what this is or how it works) and Therapeutic Listening (still not sure how this works; more on this as soon as I know more). I opted to continue working with our Food Friend (S.), for more reasons than the simple fact that something about the therapist just didn’t feel right to me. And it was not free. And I’m bad at “breaking up” with people. And I didn’t want to break up with S. anyway because the tot loved/s her and I rather did/do, too.

But the respite from transition was short-lived. The tot would “graduate” out of the Food Friend program at her fourth birthday (in the summer) and, we learned, shortly before that date our Food Friend was leaving that clinic to take on similar work with another foundation. So. A transition was necessary, and while S. would not say outright what she thought we should do, she did suggest two possible paths, if we wanted to continue working with a professional. One was Occupational Therapy at the center that did the SI eval and one was an eval at an Anxiety Disorder clinic at a nearby university – although S. was clear that she only saw that as a resource if things took a turn for the more anxious/phobic.

I struggled with whether or not I should take the tot for an eval, but I ultimately did, and this was our visit earlier this year. What the OT (not the SI eval OT) found was, I think, worth the tot’s and my time.

K., the OT, revised the previous diagnosis of Gross-Motor Delay to Motor Planning Delay. She didn’t outwardly agree or disagree with the auditory hyposensitivity, but she did suggest that we might try Therapeutic Listening at some point to see if it would help the tot regulate herself. The biggest revelation, however, was that the tot has an Oral-Motor Deficiency. As in, she can’t lift her tongue up, either inside or outside of her mouth.

Imagine taking a bite of a chocolate covered doughnut and getting chocolate frosting around your whole mouth. You begin licking your lips to get the frosting. The sides and the bottom are easy, but you can’t lick your upper lip. (For the purpose of this example, it does not occur to you to use another method of removing the substance.) Emotionally, you go from alert (“Ah! There is yummy frosting on my face and I will lick it off and get to enjoy it”) to anxious (“There is a something on my face and I can’t seem to get it off – WTF is up with that?!”) to panic (“Get it off! Get it off! Get it off!”).

What would this do to your relationship with eating? Particularly if we change the example food to a bite peanut butter sandwich that is stuck to the roof of your mouth.

Suddenly, the crunchy-only-or-liquid-only diet is making a lot of sense, wouldn’t you say?

more on the therapy and advances later – must wrap this up for now.