Happenings of Aidan with musings by his lucky parents
3 years ago, we brought you home to us. We were filled with anticipation and excitement and a healthy dose of fear. You seemed at home right away.
And look at you 3 years later. You amaze us literally every single day. Even if you do scare Mommy to death sometimes (check out the video at the end of the post…I think we might be in for a few broken bones in years to come!).
I almost hesitate to write this post. Why? Because I am mostly over this stuff. Aidan is a thriving, active, intelligent, curious, healthy 3 year old boy. Yet it is still possible to be brought back to the difficult feelings of the NICU and his first year or so in a heartbeat.
It happened while on the phone with a friend yesterday. Her daughter is almost 6 months old now. I was commenting about how much I am loving age 3 and how much more freedom I finally have. I said, “Yeah, the baby stage was just not my favorite.”
She replied with an almost tangible indignance in her voice. She told me that she LOVES her daughter’s infancy and she has PLENTY of freedom. I swallowed hard and tried just to move along. But I couldn’t. I had this idea in my head that I was being judged for what I just said. Judged for saying I didn’t love the baby stage. I started my reply. Lots was going through my head and only some of it came out of my mouth (at least I have learned something!).
I told her that I might not have felt that way if we had had ANY help during Aidan’s infancy. We have NO family here and our friends didn’t/couldn’t do much to help us. So for Aidan’s first year we had very, very few breaks. I reminded my friend that her parents live a few miles from her and will take her daughter absolutely whenever she asks. I continued by saying that she also has a full term healthy daughter, while we had just taken home a perilously premature baby on home oxygen and with a saturation and apnea monitor. I reminded her of my “Summer of Puke” and how hard it is to enjoy a 6 month old who is battling such food aversions that he vomits on you 4-6 times a day.
I didn’t even get into all we battled the first couple of years, but when I look back on it, sometimes I am surprised we made it. That our sanity held. That we managed to remain married while things were so hard. So just for a moment I am going to allow myself to remember all we managed to make it through. Bear with me.
Early subchorionic hemorrhage during week 7. Bad quad screen during week 16 of pregnancy. 21 week ultrasound reveals severe IUGR. Amniocentesis comes back with 46XY baby. Preeclampsia hits at the beginning of week 24. Baby doesn’t even weigh a pound yet. Prognosis is grim. Strict bedrest at home. Week 26 sees blood pressures no longer controlled at home and I am admitted to the antepartum ward for worsening preeclampsia. Each day we are subjected to ultrasounds that decide the fate of whether or not I am allowed to carry the baby for another day. 27w 6d. Severe Class I HELLP syndrome. Liver threatening rupture. Platelets nearly nonexistent. Aidan is starting to show some signs of distress. Emergency cesarean. Aidan weighs 1lb 8oz and is 12 inches long.
7 weeks on a ventilator. Bronchopulmonary dysplasia develops sentencing Aidan to scarred lungs. We are fortunate and do not experience brain bleeds or sepsis while in the NICU. We spend 105 days going to and from the hospital until we can finally take him home.
Aidan comes home on December 12, 2005. We are happy but scared shitless. He has home oxygen (not that big a deal once you know what you are doing). But the saturation monitor is another thing entirely. He needs to have it on, especially while sleeping to let us know if he needs his oxygen turned up. Lots of false alarms and almost no sleep for Brandon or me. December 25 sees us back in the ER and Aidan has viral pneumonia. We didn’t even make it 2 weeks at home before something happened.
January 2, 2006 is a night that neither Brandon nor I ever want to relive. Aidan was happily eating a bottle and for whatever reason, he aspirated. He choked a little and vomited. Brandon laid him on his stomach while he grabbed for a spit rag. I looked over and noticed Aidan seemed a little blue. I said, “Brandon, is he breathing?”
Brandon looked and never even replied. He grabbed Aidan, did back thrusts and then turned him over and gave him breaths. I am not sure I have ever been more scared in my life. I called 911 and I kept saying out loud, to myself, “NO! NO! Not now! Not after we went through all this! If you were going to take him, you should have taken him while he was in the NICU.”
Brandon flipped him over one more time to do the back thrusts and I was on the phone with 911. Aidan started crying. Brandon had him breathing in well less than a minute. The 911 operator sent the paramedics to check him out. The paramedics looked him over thoroughly, felt reassured that we had a monitor, and told my husband, “Good job Dad.”
The winter and spring were lonely. The RSV risk was so high we didn’t dare expose Aidan to germs with his fragile lungs. We spent those times in relative isolation. In the spring, Aidan came off his oxygen and we started solid foods. He must have had body memory of that ventilator tube, because he developed a HUGE oral aversion at that time. I spent most of the summer learning what I could/could not do when it came to food with Aidan. And I spent most of the summer cleaning up vomit. Finally around his first birthday, I talked to his pediatrician and said I thought he needed feeding therapy. He agreed and we started. Gratefully, it did wonders and we have not had behavioral or sensory vomiting in a very long time. Probably almost a year and a half.
That January, Aidan had to have a minor urological surgery. We had no idea what was about to happen. About a month later, Aidan got VERY sick. Fevers of 105+ for a few days at a time. The night I knew something was really wrong, we were in bed with him and he woke up suddenly and vomited bile. He was lethargic and we both knew a trip to the ER was our next step. The ER doc ran all the expected tests. He did a chest xray, urine sample, and drew blood (just in case, he said). Well, somehow the lab lost the urine sample, but the chest xray was clean and we needed to wait on the results of the blood culture just in case. I think we went home with antibiotics and he had been rehydrated while in the ER. He was tired and listless the next day, but did better. The following morning, my pediatrician called me and asked me where I was. I told him I was at home. He informed me that Aidan’s blood culture showed Enterococcus growing in his blood. Aidan had sepsis. This was deadly serious. I needed to get to the hospital right away. The doctor had already called and done the preadmission over the phone.
Aidan spent the next two weeks in the hospital on IV gentamicin and ampicillin. I had a nagging feeling that this somehow had something to do with the surgery the prior month, so I called the doctor who had done the surgery and explained my theory. He told me that we could set Aidan up for a VCUG. This test shows the dynamics of the kidneys, ureters, and bladder and would show if a bladder/kidney infection had been the source of the sepsis.
The test was conclusive. Aidan’s left ureter had mild reflux allowing urine from the bladder to travel back up mildly into the kidney. Not normally a problem when the urine is sterile, as it normally is, but a huge problem when you have a urinary tract infection. Aidan likely got the UTI after surgery and it travelled to his kidney where it went into the blood and he became septic.
The condition was called VUR and occurs in about 5% of kids. The angle of insertion of one or both of the ureters into the kidney allows for the flap to allow backflow into the ureter and up to the kidney. We could wait for Aidan to outgrow this (at about age 5or 6) or do a minimally invasive procedure where a bulking agent called Deflux is injected into the bladder wall to bulk up the area near the valve and prevent it from backflowing. We chose this. As a result of the kidney infection that moved to sepsis, Aidan’s left kidney was scarred minimally. Gratefully his right kidney is measuring a bit larger than average so it seems as if his body is compensating. His left kidney is still slightly smaller than his right, but it is growing on the same trajectory as the right one, so the doctors believe he will be just fine. Even still, we need to have kidney ultrasounds every couple of years to be sure.
Meanwhile, Aidan was sleeping poorly. When in our bed with us, I noticed he seemed to sometimes pause for several seconds, and then almost gasp a bit when he took his next breath. It sounded a bit like sleep apnea to me and I asked his pediatrician about it. He referred me to an ENT who told me his tonsils and adenoids were big but not huge and she would want a sleep study to confirm apnea prior to feeling ok about surgically removing tonsils and adenoids from a 1 1/2 year old. We went for the sleep study. The results were horrendous. Aidan had 54 obstructive apneas in 7 hours of sleep. During REM sleep, he had an arousal almost every other minute. The theory was that many former preemies have some transient low tone in their trunk. When we sleep, all our muscles relax, including the ones that hold our airway open. So in a sleeping, former preemie with borderline tonsils/adenoids, there was a “perfect storm” being created for obstructive apneas. His tonsils and adenoids came out the following month. He slept like a different kid.
At this point, Aidan had gotten pretty healthy. He was about 1 1/2 years old adjusted age.
Even reading through this sounds overwhelming now. I can’t quite believe we went through all that in such a short period of time. We also spent the first couple of years worried about his developmental milestones. He managed to reach them all on time, but it doesn’t stop a preemie parent from wondering if it will happen. Instead of joyfully watching your child sit for the first time, or roll for the first time, a preemie parent wipes their brow and thinks “Phew! He managed to do that one on time. What’s next?”
So to bring you full circle, perhaps you might understand why the comments of my friend hit a nerve. It isn’t as though I didn’t love Aidan and didn’t WANT to enjoy his infancy. I just couldn’t. It is hard to enjoy anything when you are living through that much fear.
As we celebrate bringing him home to us 3 years ago today, I mostly don’t think about that stuff. I mostly live in the here and now. The now of a precocious 3 year old boy who is giving us a run for our money. He is bright. He is funny. He is joyful. He is loving. But it took a lot to get us here. And while I don’t think of the hard times very often anymore, they will always be there with us. They are part of our experience as parents. They played a part in shaping who we are today. The way we navigated them (I believe) speaks highly of us as a family.
The sting of prematurity never fully goes away. But gratefully I can say that it does fade into the distance a bit.
For those of you not extremely familiar with all of the preemie lingo, today is Happy 3rd “Coulda, Woulda, Shoulda” Day for our amazing Aidan. Today, November 23, is the day he was due to arrive 3 years ago. Instead, he had already been alive for over 12 weeks. I have our family pictures taken every year right around this time because it is sentimental for me. It is a way of celebrating Aidan’s birthday on the day it should have been.
I will take some time later on today to post some more of the beautiful photographs taken of us at our photo session this weekend, but for now here are a couple of pictures that make my eyes well up with amazement and gratitude. (The first is Aidan on his due date 3 years ago, and the second is Aidan today.)
We love you Aidan. You are truly amazing.
If you are a “regular” blogreader of mine, you might notice a new tab on the top of the page. It is Resources from “Preemieville”. This is something I have been meaning to work on for a long time. I finally started today. I only have 2 pages up, but it’s a start and I will continue to add as I find the time.
When moms or dads of new preemies find Aidan’s page, one of the things that happens most often is that I get questions from them about resources or what we have personally been through. I LOVE talking to other parents of preemies, so please don’t stop sending emails. But I realized it might be helpful to the shy passerby to really document the things I found helpful and what I have learned along the way.
Not all of the information I put up on the Resources page will apply to or help every parent of a preemie, but I’m hoping it might help some.
Let me know if you have any suggestions of other things I could put up. I am planning at least the following: Our experience with oral aversion and feeding therapy, resources on birth trauma and PTSD, information on HELLP and pre-e, information about RSV, and some others I am spacing at the moment.
And since I am completely incapable of posting without a cute picture. Here they are. One of Aidan in his new winter coat (he looks SO darn old sometimes), one of him figuring out how to take the bottom plug out of his piggy bank, an interesting angle from above when he was outside with Brandon over the weekend, and some of us at the pumpkin patch yesterday.
I love being witness to the periodic leaps in development that Aidan encounters. I never know when they are going to come, but BOOM! Suddenly he is doing a TON of new stuff…almost overnight.
The generally accepted rule for adjusting a premature child’s age, is that you go by their due date for the first two years. But many medical professionals I have encountered (Aidan’s pediatrician included) are beginning to believe that you should adjust a preemie’s age for as many years as they were months early. (So in Aidan’s case, he was 3 months early, allowing for age adjustment until age 3) Still other experts believe that you do at least that, and if they were hospitalized past their due date you can adjust even beyong that.
So it is so interesting to me to watch what Aidan has done socially as of late. He turned 3 years old on August 30 of this year, but his “due date birthday” is coming up on November 23. I felt like Aidan was caught up to his peers in pretty much every way by his second birthday except for social skills. Aidan was certainly the right size for his age (err….downright big for his age). His intellectual skills are above age in many areas. For example, he has known his phonics for many, many months and has had a dozen or so sight words. He was caught up in his physical milestones save for one foot leaving the ground slightly before the other when he jumped.
Aidan spent a good deal of his first year and a half with not a lot of social contact. We had immature lungs to deal with. Oxygen, RSV shots, etc, etc. So I wasn’t surprised that he progressed well socially but just seemed a few months behind. It is with that knowledge that I decided no preschool this year.
But this kid has had a crazy developmental week! Some of the highlights.
So, in a way, I am convinced that there are aspects of a preemie’s development that really do follow his/her adjusted age. Aidan is coming up on his “adjusted 3rd birthday” next month and his social behaviors are really falling into line with your average 3 year old.
At this moment in time, I am in awe of my child. He impresses me so much. He always finds a way to surprise me with something new he is learning. He has come so very far from such a rough beginning. There is no other way to say it….He is my hero.
Some Aidan cuteness from the Science Center….
And last night in the tub.
Recently out of the mouth of Mr. Aidan:
“I wanna go up the esca-elevator!” Pointing to the escalator at the mall.
“Mommy WATCH! Aidan do it with teacher Dana!” grabbing my hand and sitting me down on the sidelines in Little Gym because he wanted to be a big kid and do his warmup without mommy’s help.
“I love you forever” after reading the book before bed with Daddy.
“Let’s go pay for this” after picking up pretty much anything that catches his eye in any store lately.
“Maybe for Christmas” which is what I have been telling him with pretty much every toy he wants recently.
Below are a couple of cute shots in the last week or so. We took him to the Mariners’ last game of the season and he fell asleep on Brandon near the end of the game.
And here he is out at the driving range with Dad. Brandon says he is getting pretty good. 
A visit to the zoo with Aidan’s friend Jaymin. Jaymin is also an almost 28 weeker almost exactly 1 year younger. They really enjoyed each other as you can see by the game of chase that ensued.
We have had a couple of really nice outings with Nathan and Preston and their mom Kim in the last week. Nathan and Preston were born at the same hospital as Aidan, about a month earlier than him. They were about 10 weeks early weighing in at 2 lb 12 oz and 2 lb 14 oz. They are great little boys (thanks to their great parents) and it is always wonderful for Aidan to hang out with them. Kim and Cecil have just done a wonderful job with these 2 boys. We all went to the zoo on Friday and all 3 boys loved feeding the giraffes and seeing all of the other animals.
On Tuesday we went to the aquarium. Aidan was quite excited to see them and was very excited to say hi to Nathan and Preston when they arrived. All 3 boys are not quite as enthralled with the aquarium as the zoo, but had a really good time nonetheless.
Watching these 3 little guys run around is almost surreal. To think of how early and small they all were and how close they all came to disastrous outcomes makes me feel so grateful. These 3 little boys are active, curious toddlers and I dare say that most people would not be able to guess how early they all were. Almost three years ago when we had overlapping NICU time, I am not sure that Kim, Cecil, Brandon or I would have ever guessed we would be dealing with the amazingly relative normalcy that we are. Instead of discussing apneas, bradys, vents, NG tubes and the like we are talking about when to start preschool, tantrums, and the like.
It seems like Aidan is looking more and more like a little boy and less like a toddler every day. Brandon got him a Nike baseball cap last weekend and I was stunned at how old he looks with it on. Here is a shot with him in it and one with his favorite “grandma” Catherine. Oh…and a really cute one where he is trimming Brandon’s toenails. Too funny.
In other news, the hubby and I are getting ready to take our first weekend trip together away from Aidan. My very gracious brother and his wife are watching him for 3 days next weekend. Aidan will be great. He loves his cousins and will probably have the time of his life. Me? I haven’t been this anxious to go on a trip in a long, long time. I can’t wait to get some time alone with Brandon. We are going to Santa Barbara for a friend’s wedding and making a weekend out of it. I can’t even imagine how great it will feel to have some extended one on one time with my better half.
Life is good. Very, very good.
Julie, over at A Little Pregnant, wrote one of the best rants I have ever read. For anybody who has ever suffered from infertility, miscarriages, prematurity, or complicated births only to have above harrowing experiences minimalized by a clueless granola cruncher…this post is a MUST read.
We spent a lot of Aidan’s first year and a half in relative isolation. He was, after all, a 28 weeker that had been vented for 7 weeks and was coming home on oxygen in December. Any parent of a preemie that had lung issues will relate to how scared you are of RSV and other nasty germs when you are finally bringing your precious little bundle home.
So we had really strict rules about Aidan’s exposure. He was on oxygen from when he came home to mid May. He was receiving monthly shots of Synagis to help him weather the effects of RSV a little better if he contracted it. This vaccine was not a preventative vaccine, but rather one that hopefully minimizes the ill effects of RSV. The only places I think I took Aidan for his first few months of life were his pediatrician for check-ups and Synagis shots, his pulmonologist a couple of times, and physical therapy.
Some people reading this may be really wondering about how germ crazy we were. I know it sounds nuts to those that have not been there. But in all seriousness, we were told in no uncertain terms that babies like Aidan can be put back on a ventilator or possibly die from RSV. Exposure to other children in these times was out of the question. Kids simply carry way too many germs, and the ones they do carry are usually more virulent than ones adults carry.
We didn’t go to anybody else’s house and anybody that came to ours had to be germ free for at least 7-10 days and nobody in their house could currently be ill. Then, upon arrival, they were greeted and taken to the sink to wash their hands. Hand sanitizer was in abundance and our guests (for the most part) seemed understanding about our restrictions.
In the summer, we could be more relaxed. Kind of. Aidan got his first bad cold in June of that year and had been off oxygen for about a month. Here we were, in summer, and it was bad. A couple of ER trips, some breathing treatments, and eventually a few day hospital stay with some oral steroids and oxygen. At this point his pediatrician put Aidan on Flovent to “keep his lungs in check” and help him be better able to weather a cold without steroids and oxygen. It worked. Aidan got a couple of colds that summer and needed some breathing treatments, but no oral steroids, no hospital visits, and no oxygen.
Then in October of 2006 we went on lockdown again. Aidan’s birthweight, gestation at birth, and lungs meant one more winter of Synagis and one more winter of being a little isolationist. Aidan did get several colds that winter, but managed them all pretty well.
By May of 2007, I was really tired of being isolated and Aidan’s pulmonologist had discharged us! I could hardly believe it. She said Aidan’s lungs look “great” and she had no reason to see us. She said his growth had helped him tremendously. We had been expecting to see her for at least a couple more years. Finally we got the OK to join a playgroup. Aidan got lots of colds from this, but I figured it was par for the course since he had not had much germ exposure. We have continued in the gym style playgroup to this day. This winter I added an inflatable play place to the repertoire, so that we are doing social things with kids his age at least twice a week.
The double edged sword is this. The very behavior that kept Aidan and his lungs protected is what is doing us in now. He is getting a lot of germ exposure that other kids his age already have degrees of immunity to. So he is in this mode where he will be sick for a few days, well for a few days or a week or two, and then get something again.
This time it’s a doozy of a stomach bug. He is going on 5 days of runny you-know-what. Actually runny is being complimentary. I’d say “gushing” is more apt. The poor little bug has a constant fever cycling between about 101 at good points in the day to 103-104 at the bad ones. He is handling it like a champ though. If I had spent the last few days sweating through my pajamas and having….err…no control, I would be in a foul mood. But he just seems interested in being loved and getting cuddles.
He is taking his first nap in 5 days where he is not attached to me. I feel like I have temporarily shed my tumor.
The positive things I take from all of this?
1. Aidan is really strong now. Sure he gets some illnesses, but he bounces back like a champ. It is wonderful to see his immune system doing its job!
2. I get a break from chasing him! 
3. This doesn’t rattle me anymore. That is seriously a great feeling. It doesn’t rattle me to see him get sick. Sure, I don’t like it. But I don’t feel that crazy, gnawing fear in the pit of my stomach anymore.
In fact, dare I say, I have become downright relaxed. About 3 weeks ago, we all went to a local pizza place. THE best pizza EVER! There was a play table with a lego train set on it and a Fisher Price garage. Do you know that Aidan was playing with that thing for over 10 minutes before my husband complimented me on how relaxed I was about the (probably never cleaned off) toys. And you know what? I hadn’t thought about it! Maybe that makes me crazy. Or maybe I am finally getting some sanity and peace.
I have a bunch of thoughts swimming in my head about preemies with feeding issues and really just want to get some of them off my chest. If this seems a little disjointed…you were warned. Compared with a lot of our other preemie pals, Aidan’s feeding issues really look mild. But this is really the one area that Aidan is still a bit “behind” in for his actual age. I had really come to a place of peace about the feeding stuff until I recently had several different people make inquiries about something having to do with Aidan and food and it got me thinking and riled me up a bit.
So…some background. Aidan is a former 28 weeker, vented for 7 weeks. Came home appearing to have no oral aversions and did well bottle feeding. Right around the time I started trying purees and cereal, he immediately began having gagging issues with the solids. I presumed it was just new to him and plowed through. But I became concerned as I began reading more and more on the preemie groups how common feeding issues were. I asked for a referral to a feeding therapist when Aidan was about 1 year actual/9 months adjusted. Aidan was vomiting on me anywhere from 4-6 times a day. The sheer amount of time spent feeding and refeeding was enough to make most people lose their sanity.
My thoughts about his gagging and aversions were confirmed by the therapist. During the time we were in feeding therapy, Aidan also began developing an aversion to his bottles. I think the stress of the gagging and aversions were spilling over into something he had always done well. As he began to make progress with crunchy foods (cheerios, crackers, etc), I decided to switch him to whole milk and sippy cups. This actually worked! I think the fact that a new container held his new kind of milk was really a nice mental clean slate for him.
The feeding therapist began having me try crunchy combinations such as really crispy grilled cheese sandwich and things of that sort. About 3-4 months after beginning feeding therapy, Aidan was on the right track and we were discharged. Things were slow going and he was still getting a lot of his calories from milk and purees. But Aidan’s growth has always been great, so his pediatrician was ok with what we were doing.
A few months later, Aidan decided that macaroni and cheese could be added to the menu. This was a HUGE leap, because it added a lot of calories to his diet. Still I fed purees at least once a day until Aidan was almost 2. Yikes, huh? Thank goodness Aidan has always done very well with yogurt and cheese, so calorically we haven’t been very challenged. But it wasn’t until about age 2 that he stopped doing the occasional gag. The chance that he could gag not only worried me, but it made it hard to want to try to new things and create a new aversion.
I followed the central piece of advice of our feeding therapist throughout it all. She advised me that our relationship with food is intricate, delicate, and lifelong. That I should really try to foster the best relationship possible with it for Aidan. If this meant that his diet was very narrow for a while, so be it. So I started giving him great vitamins (Nordic Naturals Berries) that gave him all of the vitamins he might not be getting through food and added a 3-6-9 omega in for good measure.
Aidan is thriving. He is closing in on 40″ tall and 34 pounds at 33 months actual/30 months adjusted. He is at about the 50th percentile for weight and 97th or better for height. We have been doing something right! Aidan’s relationship with food is a good one. He has a narrow food menu, but I hadn’t given it a lot of thought in a while.
Recently, my MIL asked me about his diet while she was here. (Paula, if you’re reading this….I know you meant well…no worries!) She said she noticed I hadn’t fed Aidan any vegetables. You know…I immediately felt defensive and went back to this scared space where I wondered if I was doing this feeding issue thing right. I told her that for a while it was hard to get him to eat *anything* and that I was focusing on that first and foremost. But this inner being inside me (the one still scarred with PTSD from a premature birth, feeding issues, etc) wanted to ask her if she knew what it was like to watch a child gag on everything you fed him. What it was like to have him vomit the entire meal you had just fed him on you? To know that if you couldn’t overcome this somehow that you might need to resort to a g tube or inpatient feeding therapy? I wanted to be recognized for patiently feeding and refeeding a child who vomited on me for 6 months straight. I know my MIL really doesn’t understand the feeding issue…nor should she. I think this is the central problem.
Parents that have kids with feeding issues are off on an island. Everybody else has great ideas about how you should be doing it, but they’ve never been out there with us on that island trying to feed our kid. I can’t tell you how many times I had somebody watch me making Aidan consume a certain volume of food and comment, “Kids will eat when they are hungry.” Really? Because I know a bunch who won’t. I know a bunch who would starve first.
I was even concerned about Aidan’s hunger drive for a while. I wondered if spending weeks and weeks on continuous feeds via NG in the NICU messed up his hunger drive. It is really just in the last couple of months that Aidan will tell me he is hungry. Yay…another victory!
But here comes my big question. How do you know when to give your kid a little push? Recently he has tried some things he would never have eaten before. He is now eating cheeseburger, turkey or ham and cheese sandwiches, egg scrambles with meat and some chopped veggies, and even asked me for a bite of my halibut the other night. Is it time to start pushing more veggies? And how does a mom who is a picky eater herself feed veggies she doesn’t like? Do I start by trying something new once a week?
He now has all his 2 year molars in and is much more adept and chewing. He could never eat meats like deli ham or turkey before and now he has one of the two kind of sandwiches for lunch almost every day.
I really want to abide by the central tenet from our feeding therapist (who is many ways saved my sanity way back when) and make sure Aidan has a good relationship with food. I fear that I was so scarred by the months of gagging and vomiting that I don’t know how to make neutral choices about this. It has been weeks since I heard even the slightest gag from Aidan and months since a vomit. But I am scarred enough that to this day, if Aidan gagged on the other side of the house, I would probably hear it and feel that same sense of panic come rushing back.
Help me out, readers.