Two Steps Forward, One Step Back

Having been on the reflux roller coaster before, I should have known the ups and downs and twists and turns would be coming. I should have remembered the loop-de-loops and sidewinders, too. But, as any good mom is apt to do, I blocked out much of our experience with Lexi. I think it saved what little is left of my sanity.

Addie has had a relapse. About 2 weeks ago, she started refusing her feeds, screaming, arching, throwing herself backwards, kicking and pushing the bottle away. Feeding aversions have a tendency to ebb and flow that way, giving the parent a bright sense of hope only to have you come crashing back down when it rears its ugly head again. She stopped eating her whole bottle and would cry after eating, too.

I did not want to go back to swaddling her. She is obviously organized enough to eat well. Clearly, there was an underlying issue to this problem. Rather than freak out (as I would have quickly done with Lexi), I chose to give her a week to work through it. Sometimes, time is all you need to get thru a problem. Perhaps, she was on the verge of a developmental break-through and it was throwing her off. She has been teething and maybe that was disrupting her eating pattern.

At the end of the week, things had not improved. They were slowly, but surely, declining with each passing day. I began to dread bottle time again. And then, like a thought of my own, "What about her medication dose?" Say what? "Well, she has gained 6 lbs. since you last adjusted. Perhaps, she needs an increase in her Prevacid" is the next thought I had. Hmmm. So, I pulled up our trusty dosing calculator and what do you know? Addie was being under dosed. By half!!!

I am so grateful to have figured that problem out before it became a real issue. Her feeding aversion had returned, but it was only a symptom of the pain she was suffering from. Had I approached her eating problem as only a feeding aversion, we would have only made the situation worse. I would have kept making her eat, she would hurt, hate eating more, eat less, I would work harder to make sure she was getting her calories each day, she would hurt more, eat less and on and on.

We probably won't see a real change in her behavior for at least 2 weeks as her esophagus heals from the damage it has sustained. Hopefully, we won't have to recover from this small feeding hiccup since we didn't force the issue and rather pinpointed the real problem. Of course, I wish I would have realized the problem long before she ever out grew her dose. Sadly, I'm imperfect. Sadly, Addie has suffered because of it. Thankfully, she won't remember it. I will, though, and be all the wiser in the future. Thank goodness God gives us parents a pass for the first few years so our kids can't remember all the mistakes we make!