Happy Birthday - Happy Everyday

Thank goodness for birthdays and the candles! Grace was very excited prior to her birthday and had to practice - A LOT! Multiple times a day we would sing Happy Birhtday to Grace and she would pretend to blow out the candles. Since her birthday, we continue to practice but now the candles are real! It has become a great reward for completing a meal!

It is becoming harder and harder to get Grace to complete all of her meals and snacks in a day. She lost all of the weight she gained since she has been home. She is just a hair over 25 pounds right now. She is very thin and bony. We work to get every calorie into her that we can. Many times it means using a syringe to get the heavy cream and oil into her. She does not fight the oil much. However, she acts like the heavy cream is absolute poisin! Grace is refusing to eat at most meals now. Worse than refusing the whole meal, she will eat everything in one category and refuse the rest. Such as, she will eat all of the protein or carb and none of the fat or heavy cream. Since the diet is based on ratios, this does not work.

We have had some successes with the fluids. She did not like the keto-kool-aid when we started the diet. However, the other day she helped me to make some and she is drinking it. I just keep reminding her that it is the juice we made together and she will have it. She was getting tired of decaf tea, diet grape soda, diet ginger ale and water. We expended her diet soda to include caffine-free diet cola and diet birch beer. (She will not drink the diet orange soda.) I made her special hot chocolate the other day and this time she drank most of it. We have been trying once a week but she has not liked it until this week. The hot chocolate is heavy cream with sugar-free cocoa powder and some sweet-and-low sweetner drops. I also add some water to the mix. It doesn't taste so bad!

The biggest success we found this week is sugar-free jello. Grace gets 2 cups of this per protein exchange so we can usually include one cup for half an exchange. She gets 2.2 protein exchanges per meal. We have managed to whip up some of the heavy cream and get her to eat it with the jello.

We continue to work on getting her to eat. If singing happy birthday or dancing around the kitchen gets her to eat, then that is what we do! When all else fails, we force her where we can. We switch protein and carb exchanges on the fly so that if she says she will eat a food we didn't plan on, we try to accommodate her taste at the moment as much as we can. At this point, we are happy with every complete meal we can get her to eat. We need her to put that lone pound back on and hopefully a few more to go with it!

Thanks for all of the great comments and support. We appreciate it!

Marie, Tom, Rita and Gracie - the perpetual birthday girl!!