I think I have mentioned before that a HUGE part of Luke's diet & phe management is his formula. It is like a PKU "protein shake" in that it has all the parts of protein that he needs but that he misses out on with his restricted diet. He has a set amount of formula that he must drink in a day and if he goes a little over on drinking extra then that is alright. It has zero phe in it so will not cause him to be over his phe intake, in fact it will help him feel more full if he has eaten his days worth of phe and needs a bit more to fill his belly.
When we switched over from the infant formula to the new, more age-appropriate, formula I worried so much about Luke rejecting the new one. I have read so many posts on the Facebook group about kids refusing to switch over, of parents stressing as their kids went days without drinking any formula and I was so worried. It's a big fear of mine for Luke to stop drinking his formula. Another situation I read a lot about is cases where a child starts refusing to drink their formula for "no reason" and I worried less about this because Luke loves his milky (which is what we call his formula).
Well as a toddler is known to do... Luke decided he wasn't going to drink his formula. It started on Tuesday when I noticed he was leaving his cup half full throughout the day but with some coaxing he drank the full amount. Then Wednesday I had less success coaxing him to drink it, despite many different tricks, and at the end of the day he was missing 75ml of the 375ml he has to drink. I was a bit perplexed but not overly worried as I figured the next day he would for sure be back on track. Sadly nope. At the end of Thursday he had only drank 200ml, meaning he was drinking little more then half of what he should be drinking. My Mommy-alarm started to sound in my head and I knew that if Friday looked like another low intake day I would have to reach out to his dietitians.
Friday by noon Luke had drank zero milky and I called in and left a message for the dietitians. Cue that Mommy-alarm sounding off big time. I tried many tricks I had read about on the support groups but one thing kept running through my mind, if I make too big of a deal about this then it will only make it worse - but it was so hard not to push Luke too hard to drink.
When the dietitian called me back we had a good talk about how this is so very normal and expected. Toddlers and children are such tricky creatures to understand and sometimes they just simply stop liking something they once loved - heck we had seen this many times with foods with Luke. One day bananas are his favourite thing in the world and the next week he wouldn't touch them.
We have a sample pack of flavoured formulas being sent to us, hoping it arrives next week, that we will see if he has one that appeals to him. So fingers crossed there is a taste in there he loves and he goes back to the formula loving boy he was before.
We are now back to weekly finger pokes though, until he gets his formula intake back up we maybe in for a rocky road when it comes to his phe levels.
Yeah, do not bother too much. It is very normal, that these little troublemakers are great in making us be stumped. ;) I had a very simple trick: add flavour to your formula! I did not want to change the whole nutrition, because I was very happy with my choice of formula (Holle, it is without GMO, added sugar, rice syrup, fluoride..you can check it out here: myorganicformula.com/holle-organic-formula ). So I decided to add flavours to the formula and it worked. The most loved one for my son was oatmeal banana cereal . ;)
ReplyDeleteGood luck to you!