Fattening mission

Hey all :)

Let's talk food

Here's Hux with his first food on his face at 5.5 months old, Banana! 

In my last post I was describing the challenges that we face surrounding Huxley's high tone. Tone challenges is a characteristic of cerebral palsy. Tone challenges can make gaining weight very hard on people with cerebral palsy. 

With 'low tone' people may have troubles coordinating suck and swallow reflexes. Feeding was the main reason for our extended stay at the NICU but we were able to leave the hospital with Huxley happily breastfeeding (thankfully). 

As I described in the previous post, Huxley has 'mixed tone' but his 'high tone' is what causes the most grief. Huxley is actively moving throughout the day, there are only few moments in each day that he is fully still. When Huxley gets excited, when he's concentrating, or when he's upset, his muscles contract. What this looks like is his fists clench, toes curl, and his body can go rigid. Huxley's attempts to function in his daily life takes so much more effort then a neuro typical (NT) child. Huxley's injury has caused a disconnect between what he wants to do and coordination of his body parts to achieve that want. Instead of reaching to grasp something, Huxley swings his arm several times (although it is getting much better) to reach for what he wants. All of this extra movement and the extra contractions of his muscles burns a lot of calories. We've been very lucky up until this point with Huxley's weight gain. Hux is still gaining weight but just slowly and at his last pediatricians appointment he dipped below the percentile scale. We don't want Hux to lose any weight so we are going to be adding as many 'fattening' foods to his diet as we can! 

Here's a list of fat building foods for little ones :)

Whole milk

Whole yogurt

Cheese

Banana

Avocado

Sweet potato

Eggs

Potato

Butter

Peanut butter

Olive oil

Hummus

Guacamole

Cottage cheese

Beans

Cream cheese

Honey

Let's hope we can fatten up this boy! He certainly loves his food. We are still mostly giving Huxley blended food but he does pretty well with bites of food too :) 

Beets at 11 months!

I'm working on a big post that will show Hux using all of the equipment that we have for him but it's going to take a while to take all of the pictures. Stay tuned!