Life Mountain!

Things just keep piling up here and I wonder when we will ever reach the summit of it all - then we can look forward to the slide down the other side to that wonderful utopia called 'easy life'.

N's eating has gone from bad to worse after an appointment with a dietician. She's approached it from the viewpoint of medication affecting his eating and added a supper to our food battle ground.
And so now the war rages onwards 6 times a day.

We tried the supper idea for a while but the end result was a sharp escalation in N's food avoidance behaviour - he resorted to throwing supper out in the toilet, covering it with paper and lying vehemently that he had in fact eaten. So we had to amp it up by only allowing him to eat supervised - end result - me nagging him to eat for over 4 hours a day every day. Not increased intake, just increased stress.

We were talking to his psychologist today who is of the opinion that N has absolutely no internal motivation to eat and external motivation is extremely hard to create. We will continue with a behavioural approach but there is not much hope for any dramatic kind of change. So it'll be back to the paed to see what she says medically. We're pretty much going to have to try a fairly heavy duty medication for epilepsy to see if we can generate a side effect of increased appetite but the big question at that point is how far the behaviour has become entrenched that he just won't respond to the signals.

If he doesn't I guess we simply have to push for the surgical approach and we'll have two on tubes.
I don't want to go there, the sense of failure is huge. But we also can't stand by and watch this happen to N. He's got too much to offer to let him throw it away. We also have to find an end to this incredible stress.

Speaking of stress - one really nice thing which has happened recently is my getting accepted into a trial program for the Aveeno products. I've recently been trialing 2 products and the really stand out one for me has been their Stress Relief Moisturiser - nice stuff and really helping through some of this nonsense with N!
It also makes a difference to W and his stress levels - and the scent and well as texture have to be just right for him to tolerate it so that's a big positive!!