Norah Feeds Herself

Sadly, Norah's eating habits have not significantly improved over the past few months. Try as we might, we really can't get her to eat, or even show interest in, healthy foods. The only fruit that she will eat is raisins, and those she doesn't really care that much for, picking up a couple, chewing on them lazily, then throwing the rest of them on the floor. She's gotten to the point where she won't even touch other fruit.

She is a little better with vegetables. She likes green beans and peas and will even eat lima beans. But she'll only eat the green vegetables, suspecting, I believe, that anything that isn't green must be fruit. Really, if it wasn't for the fruit yogurt I try to feed her every day, she wouldn't get any fruit at all.

Moreover, she doesn't like to be fed anything anymore, insisting that she can do it herself. This leaves us in an even bigger predicament because the only foods she wants to feed herself falls into the category of "brown"--chicken nuggets, fish sticks, tater tots, french fries . . . seeing a pattern? Fried foods are about all she'll eat.

The other day, though, we began to see a glimmer of hope. Following the theory that she will eat yogurt, I decided to mix a cup of peach yogurt in with some oatmeal (she is, at best, ambivalent about oatmeal--on the one hand it is brown, on the other, it doesn't have crust, so she approaches it warily and usually doesn't stay interested in it beyond the first few bites). When we tried to feed it to her, she closed her lips tightly and moved her face around so we couldn't get the spoon to her mouth.

Frustrated, Libby decided to put the bowl in front of her and hand her the spoon. And Norah went after the stuff. My hope is that, once she can effectively feed herself, we'll be able to provide her with a better variety of healthier foods that she will eat. As you will be able to see from the videos, though, she is nowhere NEAR being able to effectively feed herself.

And here is the aftermath (this came after a light scraping to her frontal region).