Small victory

This is what Krassimir ate for lunch today:

Macaroni and cheese, potato salad*, deli turkey, and Pediasure fortified with powdered milk.

It may not look like much, but for this boy for whom eating has been such a continual challenge, and we measure our victories in bites (as in his therapist sharing with us that he took three bites of cooked carrot instead of two bites), being able to eat an entire meal of food that has not been pureed is a big deal.

After three years of working twice a week with his speech/feeding therapist, and us working with him at home, it appears that we've arrived at a new threshold. She's been regularly reporting up to twenty bites of different soft foods, and we're getting more success with a greater variety of things here at home. We still need to puree most of his meals, because we can not get a sustainable quantity into him (yet!) this way, but being able to do an entire meal here and there served right from the food the rest of us are eating at the table is incredible.

The forward progress for Krassimir is often very slow and incredibly incremental, but a simple thing like lunch today is a great reminder of how far he's come!




* Because I am a low-tech person, this whole "having a cell phone" thing that I've been doing since January still trips me up sometimes. When I put photos on the blog the old-fashioned way** by uploading them from the ones I have downloaded to my computer from my digital camera, they then exist on the blog regardless of if I move or delete them on my computer. Today I snapped a photo of Krassi's lunch, wrote a quick post this afternoon, and then promptly deleted the photo from my Google Photos because, after all, I don't need to keep a photo of Krassi's lunch, and I'm still somewhat on top of things, like sifting out photos I don't need to keep. Well, turns out you can't delete from Google Photos if you still want it to be on the blog. SO, the photo you see above is a staged photo that I took tonight when I realized the one I'd posted was gone...but I didn't have any more potato salad, so you have to imagine there is potato salad in the bowl next to the macaroni.

** Is it ridiculous to use the words "old-fashioned" and "blog" and "digital camera" in the same sentence? Maybe better not answer that.