our LITTLE guy

Well, It's official.  Zain is now, according to our pediatrician, a "failure to thrive" baby.  He has never kept up with his own curve (particularly in weight), and even though we've been feeding him special weight-gain formula for a month now, he is still not where he should be.  He is in the 5 to 10th percentile in weight, the 25th in head size, and 10 to 25th in length.  Every time I look at his little booklet and read the words "failure to thrive", I freak out a little bit.  We knew he was small and that he wasn't gaining much (any) weight, but we didn't realize how serious it had gotten.  We are recording everything he eats this week, then we see a nutritionist Oct 3rd to try to discern if the problem is diet or something else.  As we've tried extra hard the last few days to get this boy to eat, it has become really clear that we have not been feeding him enough and we haven't been patient enough with him.  The average meal is taking him an hour.  Oh my word.  Seriously?  He has to carefully chew and swish around every single little bite of smashed beans?  He is a very picky eater, and has major major texture issues.  He has gagged and thrown up over a single pea.  A bite of rice is enough to make him gag until he throws up too.  He is a milk junkie and loves to nurse.  Still.  He still wakes up in the middle of the night to nurse (I know).  From the very beginning, he has been less than enthusiastic about food.  Maya was an eating machine.  Any time you got a spoon near her mouth, she knew what to do with it, and boy, you'd better shovel fast.  Zain could not be more different.  At lunch today I started with some yummy homemade refried beans (protein?  yes!  fat?  a teaspoon of olive oil!  flavor?  salt and cumin-super yummy!)  From the first bite he locked his lips closed.  Then spit out the skin.  Okay.  Second attempt, some turkey veggie baby food from a jar (he usually prefers the baby food from a jar over my homemade baby food).  But it was a wee bit chunky, so no way.  Okay, third attempt.  Baby rice cereal and half a banana mashed.  Only a few bites, then he was no longer interested.  Okay boy, I'll bribe you with sweets!  Added some peaches (baby food kind from a jar) to every bite, and he finally ate something!  I am so frustrated at every meal, and sitting there for an hour, waiting for him to finish chewing a bite, is awful!  But what else can I do?  Have any of you ever had REALLY picky eaters?  What worked?  What would they eat?  What can I do about his texture issues?  What will help him gain weight the fastest? 

He doesn't look too skinny here, though, does he?

Easy as ABC

Hey everybody!  We've been busy around these parts lately being crafty!  In order to preserve my personal sanity, I was looking for something that might lend a bit of structure to our otherwise unstructured days, and since little bit will not be heading off to school this year (although we are considering a part time daycare situation to give her some social outlet-thoughts and advice welcome), we need something new at home.  I've started choosing a letter (and sometimes a number and color if I am really on the ball) for each week.  It's not something that I have to plan for.  It's something I can do on the fly, and then just enjoy coming up with/finding stuff online to do that relates somehow to that letter.  We've started out the last two weeks by sitting down and just sketching out things that start with our letter of the week, then Maya colors them and circles all of the letters she can find that are that week's letters (sorry, i didn't take a pic of this part).  She also traces the capital and lowercase versions of the letter.  Then I just come up with some activities that go with the letter that we can do that week.  I find that just this little bit of structure challenges my brain and I am MUCH more creative than I would have been with no structure!  I've also used video segments from Sesame Street (on YouTube) (you can find both number and letter specific videos that are very short and are often from the episodes we watched as kids!).  Here are some of the things we've done as a result of our Letter of the week activity.  We're also trying to learn the phoenetic sound with each letter, but we're not pushing it--just trying to keep things FUN because I think that's the best way for her to learn, and before long, she will have to be in a much too serious learning environment anyway :( . . .

The letter C

Crazy colorful cookies:  a batch of sugar cookies divided into four balls, each colored a different color with food coloring, rolled into snakes (she loved that part), then rolled together (think of making clay beads--it's just like that!) and pressed/twisted/braided together--whatever!  Then you just cut them off and let little bit put them on the pan (and squash several of them).

Who wouldn't want this little face helping them in the kitchen?!  Okay, I confess, sometimes I don't want quite so much help, but I'm trying to learn to enjoy having a shadow because (and yes I am SOOOO tired of hearing it), it will be over so soon and then I will miss it. . . I know.  I know. 

Then we made some Colorful Cards:

I saw an activity on Pinterest using chalk pastels, which I just happened to have (thank you Katie F!).  You shave off bits of the pastels into a shallow amount of water, then just lay your paper right on top of the water, and it makes all kinds of cool designs.  Between each paper we would just pick a few more colors to add to the mix.

We mounted our papers on some folded paper to make cards.  SO easy and she loved dipping the paper into the water and seeing what colors we created.  My only advice would be shave LOTS of the pastel into the water for a more dramatic result, we went easy and the resulting shades were pretty light. 

Now Blogger won't let me post any more pictures so we'll talk about the letter W next time!