Homemade Blended Food Diet At Last!!

I'm thrilled to announce that I have now begun blending Faith's food from real food instead of using the canned blended food! This is something I have been wanting to do for over a year and at first I didn't get much support from the dietician we met with and then it just became a matter of not having enough time to plan it out. Her canned blended food, Pediatric Compleat, was a good starting point since it has natural foods like turkey, peas, green beans, peaches and cranberry juice in it, but it also had a lot of corn syrup which I really didn't want to be giving her. I found a great book written by a nutritionist specifically for G-Tube fed kiddos, called Homemade Blended Formula Handbook, that provides a ton of information and most helpful of all are the worksheets to create a balanced diet for the appropiate number of calories for the child's age and activity level.
I decided to start giving Faith whole milk for her morning feeding about a month or so ago and that has gone really well and made me feel better knowing that I could give her what we gave Anthony when he was her age. This weekend I realized I could easily start her homemade formula by using babyfoods that are already pureed and already in her canned formula. So I just did it, I combined green beans, peaches, milk, turkey and condensed milk for extra calories. She's had it now for two days and seems to be handling it just fine. Once I really get the hang of it, I'm planning to invest in a heavy duty blender called a VitaMix that places like Jamba Juice use. VitaMix offers some refurbished units at a medical discount for people like Faith, otherwise it is outrageously expensive.

Anthony
Anthony started pre-K last week, he goes T/Th/F from 9am -1pm now. I'm really looking forward to seeing what new things he will learn how to do. He is quickly becoming a pre-reader which I am really impressed by! He reads parts of words everywhere now, including the street signs (or asks for help if it's a new one) as we are driving places and still seems to remember every place he has ever been! Today, he got to bring the snack and something for Show & Tell, so I'm looking forward to hearing all about it when I get home.

That's all for now! Thanks for reading.
Robin