In case you wanted to know how I was really feeling.

I am a feeding therapist. I treat kids who won't eat. Or drink. Or sometimes put any sort of food or utensil in his or her mouth. They often scream and kick and gag themselves (without hands - now that's talent) just at the sight of a high chair or feeding room or unfortunately sometimes just me because they know I am the mean feeding therapist that makes them eat.

I work in a world full of people trying to help kids - to eat or speak or reason or walk or use their arms and on and on and on. Any therapist can relate to me when I say that sometimes parents can be stressful, whether they are pushy or high maintenance or "crazy". I always thought that being a therapist and being surrounded by other therapists in other disciplines on a daily basis would be really helpful for me when I was a parent. That I would be totally calm with my kid even if he wasn't the leader of the pack on every skill. Especially when it came to feeding or speaking or language acquisition since I've seen the worst of the worst. I mean parents come to see me (not me specifically, but me and my team, us) from all over the country to "save" their kid and get him or her to eat. So in my mind, I was going to be in total control.

Well y'all. I'm sad to say it. I was wrong. I'm pretty sure I've become one of those (heaven forbid!) "crazy" parents. We all remember this post and this one and this one and this one. See a little bit of a pattern here. Obsess much? Crazy? Yes. I think so.

I'm proud to say, though, that I've moved past the HUNTER'S ALMOST 10 MONTHS AND HE'S STILL NOT CRAWLING OR DOING CALCULUS OR RUNNING MARATHONS. WHAT AM I GOING TO DO!!! stage. I have to confess that I mainly moved past that because I started a new obsession. I've just been reluctant to blog about it for fear of everyone knowing the true crazy that I am, but what the heck, here goes.

Hunter refuses to drink anything that isn't breast milk or formula. He also won't chew soft solids - just sucks them or lets them sit on his tongue or tries to swallow them whole and inevitably ends up gagging himself. So since this is what I do everyday at work, I've been trying multiple feeding strategies and I'm proud to say this is what he did with his black beans at dinner tonight . . .

And after he self fed, he even gummed those beans before swallowing them.

Then after much clapping and praise and smiling and yelling "Good drinking!!!! Yay Hunter!!!" like a crazy, idiot mother, he drank this. . .

What's that in the bottle? Breast milk? Formula? No ladies and gentleman, that's juice. Yes it is.

And because I am a drill sergeant of a therapist (seriously one of my supervisors in graduate school called me that), I didn't stop there. You can't drink from a bottle forever. By the end of the meal (after more clapping and yelling like a lunatic), Hunter was drinking - I use that term "drinking" very loosely - from a sippy cup (or really quasi sippy cup - the therapist in me is not a big fan of the Nuby, but you do what you have to do).

The blue one. I couldn't make my boy drink from a pink cup when there was a blue one clean.