Hi Michelle,

 

You must be exhausted. I think most of us on this list are making most or all of our kids' foods, and some of us have feeding-disorder kids with texture issues. But I don't know anyone who's doing it for twins with a 4-year-old appetite! Wow.  I feel your pain.  Your wrists and hands must be sore from all that peeling and chopping. I hope you have great kitchen equipment!  We have been through several food processors, two heavy-duty microwaves (I know, bad), blendors and ruined lots of knives.  I have every type of peeler known to man and yet it seems like a knife still works best. 

 

Have you looked into feeding therapy? It is difficult to find good feeding therapy, but here in Virginia we actually have a very good pediatric feeding disorders clinic at our local children's hospital.  We got lucky, my son got in at 15 months when he was still just eating purees and was starting food strikes on  a regular basis.  He started therapy 3 times a week and we kept that up for 6 months, then cut back to twice a week for 6 months, then weekly for a year.  They did a full oral-motor workup, gave us a ton of oral-motor exercises to do three times a day, lots of chewing devices, and we worked on introducing and chewing different textures for ever and ever. They taught us how to use ABA to reinforce eating and make meals a pleasant experience for him.  It was a very long process, but he was eating new textures within a few motnhs and after a year had learned to chew and swallow most kinds of foods. He still doesn't eat independently - because he just doesn't like food - but by using the ABA system of prompts and reinforcers the clinic taught us, he eats willingly the food that we give him.  He still has some texture issues and recently we re-entered the clinic to focus on getting him to work on independent eating (he's 5.5).

 

There aren't very many comprehensive clinics like this, only 2 I know of, the other is in NY.  But they do a GREAT job. People come from all over the world.  They have inpatient, day patient, and outpatient programs.  You might want to see what's available in your area or consider traveling to one like ours.

 

As for the cooking, my husband and I share that job now. We work full time, so we cook at night after our son goes to bed - it's our only time.  So we're usually up til midnight and then up again at 6. It really impacts what else we can do, our sleep, and our quality of life. But at least we share it. He cooks one night and I cook the next.  Our mother-in-law hired a prep cook for us a year ago, which has been a lifesaver. We pay him $50 a week and he does all the big chopping and peeling work. We deliver him a big bag of produce (squash, apples, zucchini, turnips, etc), and he delivers us back a cooler full of Ziploc freezer bags full of chopped or grated frozen fruits and veggies. These go right into our freezer and then that's what we use to cook. It's cut down our cooking bills, and we feel the price is very reasonable.  It was pretty hard to find someone to do this kind of work, but needless to say we are thrilled with the arrangement!  If MIL stopped paying for it, we would find a way to pay for it ourselves, because we were beyond exhaustion before and could not go back to doing that kind of labor on top of our jobs and caring for our son ... feeding him takes us 3 hours a day alone, 5 hours on weekends!

 

I hope you can find a way to make your cooking easier .... I can only imagine how difficult it must be with 2 growing kids.

 

Suzanne

 

-------------- Original message from "momtotwinsnmore" <gillespies62599@...>: --------------

My twins are 4 and still eat a pureed food diet. Is there anyone else
on here in this dilemna? They can only eat a short list of all natural
and organic foods due to food allergies but I have to puree it every 3-
5 days. It's exhausting to say the least. Thanks so much.
Michelle in PA