Wednesday 18 February 2015

A momentous Occasion

For many parents this is a sad occasion. One filled with "awes" and comments about "needing to have another baby" but for me, this occasion has only been met with joy. Pure joy.


Kicky has grown out of size 1 clothing, and while he still can wear size 2T shirts he can't fit the pants and has finally, FINALLY! grown into size 3T clothes- at last they fit! these are the same clothes his brother was sporting around his second birthday.. And Kicky will be three years old in exactly a month from this date.

For my readers who don't have much back ground surrounding Nicholas Kranz and the solids saga it goes something like this: Born a larger than average baby, grew like a mushroom until he was six months old and was as healthy as they came. He had never even had a cold. But this wasn't to last. Solids was not right around the corner for me. Kicky was to be almost solely breastfed until he was eighteen months of age.

One can imagine the stress this kind of situation puts on the mother and child but for the most part while Kicky wasn't growing much past his first birthday (when he managed to sort of fit size 2T with plenty of room) He still looked okay. Happy, making developmental milestones etc. But by the time he turned two years of age I was feeling it. Producing enough milk was tough and to make matters worse Kicky was losing condition and constantly sick with colds and tummy upsets. We discovered when he was 17 months old that he was allergic gluten and all types of diary. With these items scrapped from our solids list he had begun to gain weight again but all of his foods were pureed. He firmly refused to chew.

At the first sign of illness he would refuse to eat. If he had a vomiting bug it would take weeks to get him to consume more than a bite at a time. Poor Kicky was nasal tube fed more than once because of too much weight loss and being ill.


Then when he was two and a half years old our situation really hit crisis point. Kicky was so unwell and had been off the small amount he had been eating for far too long. He lost 3 pounds in as many days and was pale white. Feeling desperate and knowing that PEG feeding was around the corner if we couldn't get him to eat or at least gain weight I decided to try a liquid Multivitamin supplement from the local health food shops.

I bought HiVita Liquid Supplement as he'd had this one in the hospital before. Normally I am against Supplements because a lot are synthetic (including this one) and unless you know exactly what you are lacking you can put your body seriously out of whack. But desperate times call for desperate measures and so we bought the bottle and started dosing Kicky once a day in the mornings.

To my absolute delight it worked. The same day Kicky started the supplement he started really looking for food. Within four days he had changed color! He went from the bone white and listless toddler to a much healthier pallor- almost caramel colored- in FOUR DAYS! from a simple mutli, which tells me that he must have been very very deficient.  

Since then we have dosed him everyday and today- He went up a size! Hooray!