She's EATING!!

Life around here is definitely not boring. Last week alone we had 3 appointments - one for our first post-placement visit with our social worker, one follow-up with the International Adoption Clinic and Lily's first appointment with her pediatrician (SHE HAD SHOTS!!). Every day with our Lily-bug is so special. We watch her grow and develop and, I guess since I see her every day, I forgot that she is actually still struggling to catch up with her fellow 8-month old peers. To me she is perfect and so smart and doing things that I never could have imagined just 6 short weeks ago.

Part of our evaluation and treatment at the International Adoption Clinic is a developmental assessment. They use OT/PT and speech therapy professionals to assess where the babies are and make suggestions for helping them to catch up. The person who we saw estimated that Lily is about at a 4-6 month level developmentally right now. She is still not sitting up completely on her own, is only babbling with vowels and definitely is making no moves to crawl. On top of this, we had tried to feed her some rice cereal with a spoon and she HATED it. Although the orphanage said she had been eating congee and soup, she had no idea what to do with a spoon or how to swallow outside of the bottle. When I tried to feed her, it made her gag and she screamed bloody murder. This was actually our second attempt at feeding with the spoon...




Not good. The developmental specialist gave us some suggestions and told us some signs that would indicate that Lily was ready for solids. She told us floor exercises to do, some suggestions on helping her to sit, etc. Supposedly an indicator for whether a baby is ready for the spoon is that they have trunk control (can sit) and can grab toys/objects and manipulate them outside of their mid-line. We spent a few days really working with her and have seen tremendous progress. She has been on the floor a lot and we are using the boppy and floor gym in non-traditional ways to get her to sit up and grab. I am so proud of her. We decided to try the spoon again and guess what ?!?!? She got it!!! We reclined the high chair as suggested, thinned the rice cereal significantly and first tried to get her to suck the spoon. After a few times with that, she was ready to take the spoon almost like normal.

Here she is....




I know this may seem like a mundane thing but it's a huge step for our baby girl. After all, we LOVE food in this house. We will keep this up for a week or so and then add bananas. I can't wait for every day that I get to experience life through my sweet girl.