OT with Liam - working with food

On Tuesday, we packed up a lunch bag of two preferred foods and two non-preferred foods to take to Liam's occupational therapist for the beginning stages of dealing with his gagging on foods.  For his preferred foods, I brought two crunchy foods which is the texture he enjoys.  For his non-preferred foods, I bought scrambled eggs and a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.  He has always had trouble with eggs and more recently the gooey texture of pb&j and bread.  I stayed in the waiting area, so that they could observe him without me.  They wanted to make sure it wasn't more behavioral than sensory related.

The results:  He ate some of each, but they approached it in a different way.  They took a big piece of paper and drew two rows of boxes putting a little of each food in the boxes.  They alternated a non-preferred food and then a preferred food.  If he ate a bite of the non-preferred food, he would then get a bite of the preferred food.  The therapist was very happy with the results, and there was very little gagging.  We will continue to do this each week with different foods, but her inital thoughts are that approaching foods he dislikes in very little doses, along with preferred foods is a good way to go.

So tonight, we had chicken that Liam always has trouble with.  I completely forgot about giving it to him in small doses, as the chaos of my house at dinner time makes rational thinking almost impossible!  Anyways, when I served everyone their dinner, Liam started gagging when trying bites of his chicken.  He asked if he could do the "little squares" like at therapy, and I was happy to try.  So I got out a piece of colored paper, drew some boxes and started putting different pieces of his dinner on it, the way the therapist had showed me, and would you believe he ate every piece without gagging!  Seriously!?!  My husband and I just stared at each other in amazement!  Yes, it is a mess and inconvenient, but it works for now.  I may never truly understand what goes on in his little brain, but for now he will be eating his dinner off of construction paper with little squares :)