GI Compliment

On Wednesday, I took Caden to a follow-up appointment with his GI doctor. The doctor and her dietitian haven't been super supportive of me doing a blenderized diet (BD) with Caden but they were “allowing” me to do it without much of a fight.

We met with the dietitian first and I went over a basic recipe for Caden with her. She seemed somewhat impressed as she made notes about it. Then she asked how it was working for me to do the BD for him. I told her it was working great and I was really happy to be providing my son with real, healthy, whole foods. :) After some more discussion, she said she was slightly concerned that he wasn't gaining weight very well. If he was following his curve, even if he was small, they wouldn't be concerned. But because he was dropping off his curve slightly that was causing her some concern. In her words, she was “mildly” concerned about it but she was willing to give us more time on the diet before “encouraging” us to start supplementing with formula (not going to happen!).

Her suggestion was to increase his daily calorie intake so as to hopefully increase his growth. We just want to see him on an upward trajectory. I agree that is what we want and I told her I would be willing to sit down and work on his recipes to make sure we increase calories.

After waiting awhile longer, the doctor finally came in, followed by the dietitian. The doctor came right up to me and said, “Are you going to start selling this stuff?” referring to the BD. She told me how impressed she was with the quality of the nutrition he was getting in his food. :) HUGE compliment coming from her, believe me!!! It makes me happy to know that I am giving Caden good nutrition with natural, whole foods. I know formula has it's place, but it wasn't working well for Caden and it certainly wasn't providing him with the same nutrition that real food does. I know some orally eating kids at 18 months old are still on formula, but it's usually not the only thing they get. They are also eating regular food. So it doesn't make sense to me that he would be getting 100% formula. And if we can help it, we would like to keep him off of it entirely. We should be able to do that with BD, we just have to tweak the recipes.

I'm so happy that Caden's GI doctor was willing to recognize how healthy he is. She even commented on how “fantastic” he looks. I know it has a lot to do with his diet. He used to have pale, pasty skin and now he has more natural color to him and he is bright-eyed and curious about everything. What we eat makes a huge difference in how we feel so of course that would be true for him as well. Now we just need prayers that he will start steadily gaining weight on BD so he can be healthy and strong.