Discharged!

Will has been discharged from Ms. Risa's helpful chewing therapy because he is now a chewing machine. Likely, if you ask Ms. Risa, I am the one who is being discharged. She's been like a security blanket for me.

You see your child choke just one too many times and you realize you never did that *&%$# CPR class while you were pregnant and can't remember the one you did when you were 16 and you really start having a panic attack.

So, I have been cautious to say the least. She would encourage me to add texture, make the pieces bigger etc. I would slowly SLOWLY come around to that and little by little realized that Will can handle bigger stuff.

In my defense, I didn't think it was fair to his teachers to send food to school that he might choke on, so I was slowly adding the stuff in at home and once I was certain he could do it by himself, then I would start sending it to school. Whatever, I'm here now. :-)

Gone are the days of cutting up blueberries! He can eat an entire raspberry now.

I was reflecting on this with Neil the other night. For whatever reason there is a specific conversation I've always had in my head with another mom. Her daughter is right about Will's age and about a year ago we were at their house eating dinner and she said, "isn't it funny how the kids chew so exaggerated, kind of like cows." I of course agreed and laughed and secretly wondered if I'd ever really know what she was talking about - Will was no where near chewing like her daughter.

Well, now, a year and a few months later, I KNOW!! :-)

Thank you so much Ms. Risa. My only regret is that you escaped me without a picture. I'm going to work on fixing that though!

I took these pictures the other morning when he was asking for more food to eat for breakfast. Sad little face, how can you say no to that!

Chew on This

Well, we're back into the groove of being home from Cali. Will slept like a champ on Sunday and the jet lag didn't seem to bother him too much. He seemed happy to be back at school and the teachers and kids gave him a warm welcome on Monday. Will brought his cousin Carson a Stanford Frisbee and it was quite the hit!

So you may be wondering if we've noticed any changes since Will started the drug. Nope! We don't anticipate seeing anything. We simply hope that the brain scan on week 13 will show improvement.

His wonderful OT, Risa, did chew therapy tonight with Will and he was able to say her name Re-sa really clearly. I'm sure Aunt Lisa will be happy to hear that he can say "Le-sa" now too. :-) We'll have to make a phone call soon. Speaking of chewing. We had a big milestone tonight!!! Will ate a Ritz cracker tonight. He took a clear bites, chewed, swallowed and didn't choke!

This is a HUGE milestone for us. One of the classic symptoms of a mito disorder is hypotonia - poor muscle tone. That means even muscles in his mouth. Chewing is not just crunching food up - that's actually called munching :-) Chewing is defined as moving food laterally from left to right in your mouth and then munching on each side. He's a pro now at munching and the chewing is getting less sporadic and much more frequent.

So, while I continue to be paranoid every time he puts something more than liquid in his mouth, I'm getting a lot more confident in his ability - I never thought he would actually not choke on a cracker. We had a REALLY bad choking on a tortilla chip. I vowed off anything like that in the future, but now here we are, two years since we started solids, we chew! One day we're going to have another kid and it's going to be weird to have a child who (hopefully!) chews!

In other classic Will antics - his language and vocabulary has just shot through the roof. The other day he actually said, "Please help me mommy." Four words that made sense and were clearly spoken. He continues to imitate and mimic words and actions. My least favorite recent word acquisition is four letters and starts with "s" and ends in "t" - he picked that one up from dear ol' dad this morning :-) Luckily, there are lots of things that rhyme in case he decides to whip that out in public. Some of his new favorite words include firetruck, firehouse, suitcase and hotel. Can't imagine where those came from! :-)