Daycare/ Feeding issues
jenniferraborn
member
I posted this on Feb 2013 board as well.
So, DD will be 1 on Valentine's Day. She was born 6 weeks early and is developmentally delayed in a few areas even based on her adjusted age. According to EI she is moderatly delayed in communication and gross motor skills and mildly delayed in "social/emotional". Daycare is going to keep her in the infant room for a while longer since right now she would get trampled in the 1-2 year old room. She isn't crawling/pulling up/ sitting herself up etc. This I agree with. We are working with a PT on physical mobility etc. She is currently still eating mostly purees and is drinking from a bottle. I understand that these things are not age appropriate but we are TRYING.
Until the last week or two she gagged/projectile vommitted anything that was not purees. Now she refuses to let you feed her anything else but will play with and ingest SMALL amounts of some table food (carrots,toast,green beans, etc.). I swear I have offered every type of sippy cup known to man but she just chews on them and doesn't really get anything out. Anyways, daycare requires they to be transitioned to table food and whole cow's milk out of a sippy cup by a year.
Despite my best efforts I just don't know if that is going to happen. My concern is this...DD is 15 lbs so on the smaller side. If they go to only providing table food and a sippy cup I am afraid that she will not be getting enough nutrition. They say it is part of USDA regulations.
What would you do? Bring it up with pedi and go from there? How are other parents with babies who aren't rocking table food / sippy cup handling daycare? Also , has anyone dealt with holding LO back in a room with younger daycare children? I feel like that part is going to get complicated too since she seems to be mentally more up to par just more physically delayed....makes things complicated.
Re: Daycare/ Feeding issues
She was evaluated by EI but we were already seeing PT prior to that. We opted out of actually using services offered by EI because we liked the PT that we were working with and due to income / insurance issues we were going to pay more for the to see the EI PT rather than the one that we are already working with. I have considered getting and OT/ speech eval but when they did her EI eval at 9 months 29 days they evaluated her as 9 month old and decided she was borderline on whether she needed one and didn't reccommend one at that point. I plan on discussing this with her pediatrician at her 12 month checkup and see if she thinks we should go ahead and see a SLP.
Sippy cups....I have tried hard spout and soft spout and acutally bought one of the playtex straw cups this weekend. So far, no go. She just chews on them and completly ignores the ones with the hard spout. Just shakes them around like they are a toy. She is able to hold her own bottle but for some reason has a hard time grasping the concept of tilting the cup to get liquid out. That and she chews instead of sucking.....I'm hoping that if we keep trying it will click.
This part confuses me "Anyways, daycare requires they to be transitioned to table food and whole cow's milk out of a sippy cup by a year.". I would press daycare on this and want to see something in writing on this. This may be more of a convenience thing for them but don't see if impacting their licensure/accreditation. You can see by my siggy my Lo's age and she still gets bottles and sippy cups at daycare. We've been offering her a sippy cup for months and she literally just takes sips and then drops it on the floor. She's never done even an oz out of one yet.
Check into OT/Speech through EI. They can sometimes do exercises to help with oral aversions and build a feeding goal into LO's plan.
I am extremely torn. I want her to do the things kids her own age do. In her current room they do pretty much everything on demand and don't really have a schedule. In the 1 yr old room they have a schedule/routine which I think would be good for her. I am just terrified a little of my child who can not sit herself up being in there with kids running around. I am also a foster parent to a 21 month old and I cannot imagine DD bieng in a room full of him. Honestly , right now I have no say in whether she gets moved up but once we get feeding under control I think I will. Hopefully by then she will be able to "hold her own" so to speak and I will be more comfortable with transitioning her.
@usm123 thanks for the great advice. You gave me several good options to discuss with daycare as we move forward. I'm not sure if splitting rooms for a while is an option but that sounds like a great idea to me.
@Nita14701 they said that is is a part of USDA regulations? I dunno. I am going of of what the room teachers say and haven't addressed it with the director yet.
It's just so hard to know how to accomadate when they aren't the "norm".