The feeding therapy is a whole bunch of “two steps forward, one step back”.

To rehash why the Monster’s in feeding therapy – he’s very picky about what he’ll eat.  Over time, we’ve been watching how his selectivity of what he eats has been increasing, removing old favorites from his repertoire and quickly making it quite impossible for us to have just one dinner for the entire family.  Eating at the holidays turns into a bit of a guess as to what he’ll be willing to try, or requires us to have at least something on the menu that we know in advance is on the approved list.

So, really, the goal of feeding therapy is to try to have a breakthrough and get him to be willing to eat more things.  To be experimental as most kids should be.

Over the last few weeks, the doctor and the wife got the Monster to be willing to eat pureed pasta and sauce at the clinic, which was a huge step forward.  This has been as we’ve been tinkering with things here at home, to keep him from eating the same thing all the time.  (Pizza.)  So part of this week’s ‘homework’ is to implement exactly what they were doing at the clinic – that he has five minutes to eat some of the pureed pasta, and that if he eats enough to take five tokens off of a velcro board, he gets jelly beans.  (For each token, he gets bubbles.)  After the five minutes, it’s all done, whether he’s eaten or not.

Tonight, I came home from work to find the wife very frustrated, since the Monster apparently was very resistant to everything.  Not a single nibble, really, and that wore her down from having to handle it.  He did, of course, eat a preferred food afterwards that was not pizza – yogurt – and so he’s not exactly going to bed hungry, but it’s not like we’re having a good change to his habits.

We’re going to supposedly try oatmeal in the next day or so to see if he’ll try that again – he used to like it way back when – but I’m not holding my breath.