"Ate great today"

A common frustration among most parents of children with Williams syndrome is the child's lack of eating. I'm not talking about a few days here or there when they won't eat, or when they turn up their nose at a certain food offering -- I'm talking about not eating for weeks on end. Some don't eat because they have texture issues or low enough muscle tone that they can't chew food properly and need to be fed via g-tube; others just simply don't eat for unknown reasons.

Kieran falls into the latter category. I never know if a day will be a good eating day (meaning he ate something for breakfast, lunch, and dinner) or a bad eating day (meaning he ate mostly nothing at any meal). Although I try to cram as many calories and good nutrition into him via drinks (kefir, Carnation instant breakfast, fruit juices) as I can, my mantra has become, "Well, we'll try again tomorrow."

He doesn't often eat the snack and lunch he's served at daycare, and apparently the daycare teachers have begun to feel my pain. On Friday, they were excited that he actually ate something for lunch and wrote it into their daily report for him.

He didn't eat the cupcake they gave him for morning snack (the mother of one of the girls in his class brought them in to celebrate her birthday), but he did actually eat the chicken tenders and fries for lunch. And there was great rejoicing -- by his daycare teachers