Cues

Preface: Olivia is a really good eater. The older she gets, the more willing she is to eat a variety of good foods and she can eat a lot. Like, a really lot. As in, almost as much as her 165lb dad. So yes, she’s a great eater.

But today I was talking with a co-worker about O’s early days and some of her eating quirks came to mind.

When Olivia’s received her 5p- diagnosis at two years and three months old, her doctor told us to put her back on whole milk to help her gain weight. She only weighed 23 pounds at that point and we wanted her to weigh more because more weight would mean a stronger constitution.

My concern about the whole milk, though, was the ever-present threat of constipation. We’d dealt with that off and on with Olivia most of her life. Poor kid. If it wasn’t reflux, it was constipation. Ugh.

The doctor told us that Miralax is a good medicine to use, that it wasn’t habit forming and we could use it as needed.

I didn’t like the idea of any medicine if we could help it, though.

So instead of buying Miralax, I talked to O’s therapists, her other doctors, my mom, everyone I could think of. One of her therapists suggested sugarless gum. She said that she’d read somewhere that sugarless gum makes your mouth produce saliva that, when swallowed, helps aid in digestion. We decided it couldn’t hurt.

Olivia loved gum. She still loves gum. She’s constantly asking for gum.

My step-son, who has a son who a year younger than Olivia, wanted to know how we’d taught Olivia not to swallow the gum.

I told him we didn’t have to teach her, it was as if she had an instinct about it. She just never swallowed gum. She also never threw it on the floor when she was done. We were pretty lucky there.

But as I thought about this I remembered that when Olivia first started eating solids, she was a pocketer. What is that? It means that she held the last bite of food in her mouth, between her cheek and her teeth. She was simply done eating and instead of swallowing that last bite, she pocketed it and refused any more bites. It took her until she was over four years old to figure out how to use her tongue to spit food out.

So after every meal, we had to do a sweep of O’s mouth to get that last bite out of the pocket between her cheek and teeth. Ick.

But it worked and whatever, right?

Another non-verbal cue Olivia developed between two and four was the ‘done burp.’ When she’d had enough to eat, she gave off this belch that seriously put most grown men to shame. It let us know she was full, she was done. Do not give her another bite.

These days, at six years old, O’s lost her done burp and she no longer pockets her last bite of food. When she’s done, she simply says, “I’m full.”

Look how very far we’ve come.