Food is, once again, the ENEMY

Thursday, July 31 Picture offering a child every food you can imagine from those you try to reserve and offer sparingly to those you freely encourage, and being rejected. Every food…every one except two are being rejected. And when I say everything, I mean e-v-e-r-y-t-h-i-n-g. Can you imagine the absurdity of rattling off every enticing sweet treat you can think of only to have the response be, “No Thanks?” The two foods he will tolerate eating are blue corn tortilla chips and home made Belgian waffles which, thankfully, are full of butter. It is so, so, so frustrating to see the weight Liam put on his body quickly evaporating. In two weeks he has gone from finally having a big enough stomach to be able to wear size 4T clothing to being back in 3T. I almost can’t bear to look at him naked. Granted, he doesn’t look as badly as he did when the skin literally hung off his body, but to me he is painfully skinny. And of course when Liam is at his home in New Jersey, his wardrobe of choice is nothing so there’s no hiding from the change in his body. I have to keep reminding myself that this is a short diversion we’re on, it’s temporary, we’re going to be back on track soon, and he was in the 75 percentile for his weight two very long weeks ago. The ONLY thing we can get him to “eat” consistently is Pediasure chocolate drinks. We call them chocolate milk and Liam loves them. And, after doing some research, we found out that if he drinks 32 ounces of Pediasure a day, he doesn’t even need to eat solid foods. How great is that? That’s right…food can be completely replaced with Pediasure. So, we follow him around pretty much all day and all night with a cup in our hand encouraging him to drink a sip every few minutes. There are times he drinks and times he looks at us and thrusts out his fingers and says, “In two more hours I’ll drink!” And, of course, we’ve had lots of conversations about the role of food in helping make a body grow, veiled threats that he won’t become a big firefighter unless he eats, and how his engine won’t run without gas to keep it going…but they all fall on deaf ears of a little boy who simply has no interest in food.