Pumpkins and Puke

What a lovely title for a new blog entry, don't you think? We had round 2 of Pukefest 2008 over the weekend (round 1 was during our ill-fated trip to Florida in April). Poor Joey picked up something along the way and started feeling sick by the end of last week, with a deep, chest-rattling cough and lots of sneezing. It's hard to say if he was really sick to his stomach...he would throw up after a coughing fit. The poor child inherited at least one thing from his Daddy...an extremely weak gag reflex. This is also likely due in part to the low muscle tone in his neck and mouth, which also results in a whole lot of drooling when most kids are over that stage of life by the age of 2.5. The good news is that whatever this bug is it didn't travel to his head and he never did become congested, which is always our big fear when he gets sick because when he is congested he has a VERY difficult time eating or taking a bottle. His appetite seemed pretty steady so for that we're thankful.

After being inside Friday night and all day Saturday we thought Joey seemed well enough to go to Chappell Farms yesterday, something we do every year in the fall. He certainly wasn't his usual smiley self but he also wasn't miserable. We took lots of pictures, some with Joey in his adorable Halloween costume, and most of them are straight-faced Joe, instead of bubbly Joey. I'm okay with that, as most of the pictures we have of Joey are of him smiling so it's nice to get a few with a more serious look.







A bit of a smile on the hayride


The best we could manage of a family photo

Surrounded by pumpkins

Our sweet, sweet monkey

I love this picture of our friend Brian and daughter Georgia, searching for the perfect pumpkin

Time to go home!

Luckily Joey gets to go back to the farm this week with Gramma and his nursery school class. He seems to be on the mend so hopefully he will enjoy himself a bit more.


Today we have a busy day in store. This morning at 9:30am we have our early intervention infant development worker coming over, accompanied by our new speech language pathologist, to work on communication. I actually had some homework to do for this visit, and much like when I was in high school I procrastinated and was scrambling to get it done yesterday! I had to take pictures of Joey's favourite toys and the SLP is developing some sort of activity to do with them.


Then at 11:30am we have a team of three people coming over; our dietician, an occupational therapist and the OT's supervisor, to observe Joey eat and perhaps give us some suggestions on how to improve the situation. After my begging, pleading and advocating for more OT service we finally got approved for 2, yes TWO, OT sessions to deal with Joey's feeding issues. Apparently this new OT is really, really new, and at the suggestion of our dietician who is much more experienced with kids and feeding issues it was decided that the OT's supervisor should also join us. Yesterday the dietician called us and said she had been at a conference all weekend and learned some new things, and thought we should videotape Jason feeding Joey his dinner last night, since getting Joey to eat on command in front of an audience of strangers can be challenging. So Jason had homework too, which was a nice change for me, and he rose to the occassion. Once I figure out how to transfer it to the computer I'll post it on the blog so you can see what a messy affair feeding Joey is.


So I'm hopeful that this morning we will maybe get some more useful suggestions on how to make meal times more enjoyable for Joey, and how we can work on getting him to bring food to his mouth himself and maybe transition into the exciting world of textures. Fun times!

No word yet on the results of our MD test, but we're really not expecting anything for another month.

Wish us luck today!

-P, J & J