The Incredible Shrinking Baby!

Yesterday I took Jude in for his 15 months appointment (though he is almost 16 months already!) and while he is doing great developmentally, he is shrinking.  I of course can’t find the sheet of paper with his exact stats on it but I remember he weighed in at 22lbs putting him in the 31% for weight and for height he was in the 35% and for head size he was in the 13%.  And not that these stats are terrible, but according to their records he hasn’t grown at all since his last check up height wise (they said he shrunk actually and is shorter, but I don’t believe that, I think it must be a mistake on someones part), his head size hasn’t changed and he weighed a pound and a half more last month when he came in sick with an ear infection.  So he is for sure loosing weight at this point.  Ugh.

We talked a lot about his diet and our concerns that he is pretty much only eating fruit and won’t really drink milk out of the sippy cup and obviously isn’t eating enough.  So we are doing a few things to combat this, first our pediatrician is having us give him a bottle of Pediasure at bedtime to be sure he is getting all of the iron and protein he needs along with some extra calories.  I know, we get him off bottles finally only to be told to go back to giving him a bottle.  But she wanted to be sure he’d actually drink it and we are only going to be doing this for a month (assuming when we go in a month that he has gained weight and is eating better).  Also we are changing how we are feeding him.  Before we would be worried that he was hungry and so we’d offer him fruit and snacks all day long to try to get him to eat something.  And I think after talking about it that our method was keeping him from ever really getting hungry, which is why he wouldn’t ever really sit down to a meal.  So now he is on a stricter schedule of eating two snacks and three meals a day. Also, for his meals he isn’t going to be offered any fruit, though we will still give him fruit for snacks and go back to giving it at meals once he gets used to eating other stuff.  And so far it has really worked!  Yesterday before his appointment he would only eat his yogurt smoothie and some blueberries for breakfast and at lunch all he would eat is a cutie. But that afternoon I held off on giving him anything other than one tiny snack so at dinner he scarfed down some grilled chicken, edamame, cheese and a cup of milk!  I seriously have never seen him eat a bite of chicken or drink more than a sip of milk out of a cup, so it was awesome!  He only drank about 4 ounces of the Pediasure at bedtime but I think that was because the flavor was not what he was used to in a bottle and he just wasn’t super hungry because of his big dinner.  And then today he had his morning breakfast smoothie but then we held off until right before his 11:00 nap to do anything else and he totally ate scrambled eggs and breakfast sausage and a cutie!  Again, I’ve never been able to get him to eat eggs before and I’ve only seen him eat like two bites of sausage.  So awesome!  And he is in such a better mood too now that he is finally getting some real food in his tummy!

So we are going to keep working at it and hopefully next month we will see some progress when we go back in!  I hate being worried that my baby isn’t doing well!
-Liz