Lucas Camilo

For a while now we’ve been talking about diversifying Lucas’s feeding routine, and the recent purchase of a high-powered Vita-mix blender has now made it possible.

For Lucas’s first 10 months of life, Krista pumped more milk than he could eat.  So in late June, when the the stand-up freezer in the garage was completely packed with frozen milk, we decided we had enough of a stock pile and Krista stopped pumping.  (At one point the freezer was so full of frozen milk that we had to donate some of it.)  There are a thousand great things about having all this milk, including the fact that Krista got to eat and eat and eat for 10 months, and Lucas and his immune system reaped the benefits.  But now, with Lucas a year old and just a couple shelves of the frozen stuff left, it’s time to plan for our post-breast milk future.

Lucas still gets all of his nutrition through a g-tube which somewhat limits the possibilities of what he can eat.  If you ask the GI specialist at Children’s, it totally limits the possibilities, leaving only one option: formula.  Needless to say, we’re not so excited about feeding Lucas exclusively commercial formula for the foreseeable future, and so for a long time we’ve assumed that we would develop a feeding routine using – gasp – real food!  In preparation for the battle over Lucas’s feeding, the GI specialist started months ago to dismiss the real-food option: “Of course there are some wack-job granola hippie-types that actually blend their own food to put through the g-tube, but they usually go completely insane after a couple months.”  Krista was prepared, then, for the argument that ensued a few weeks back when it was announced that we were officially joining the ranks of the wack-job granola hippie parents.

The conversation lasted an hour, and the doctor tried every tactic.  “I really do support you on this, but do you want to cause horrible pain and suffering to your son?” was the starter.  Krista reminded her that Lucas doesn’t have reflux, the cause of her concern.  Then, “I really do support you, but Lucas is just so complicated.”  Krista explained that we’ll do the work of calculating nutrition content, and spared reminding her that Lucas did not come with a mathematical formula.  Then the low-blow: “I really do support you, but have you ever had food poisoning?”  Krista, not so nicely this time, told her that we’re aware that no matter what you feed your kid, we realize you’re supposed to clean the dishes (and tubes) after eating.  And finally, when she was too tired to argue any more, the GI doctor gave us a list of questions to ask of other crazy hippie parents in our dreaded online parent forums.

Although it will be helpful to get her to sign-off on this (our nurses need orders from someone to change their routine), the beautiful thing is that we don’t actually need a doctor or specialist to figure out how to feed Lucas real food through a tube – we’ve got a network of parents who been doing this successfully for years and are more than willing to share their techniques.  Sure, we’re going to need to consult with a nutritionist to try to get a good balance of protein, vitamins, etc, and we’ll need to keep checking in with the GI specialist about weight gain and any other issues that may arise, but we don’t need anyone’s official permission to feed Lucas carrots and apples and tofu and kale.  Plus, we’ve got the Vita-mix.

For those who aren’t familiar with this remarkable kitchen appliance, the Vita-mix is the most heavy-duty high-powered blender you could ever imagine.  It makes peanut butter, liquefies about anything, and can even make almond milk or hemp milk out of, yes, whole almonds or hemp seeds.  And, we picked up the latest edition of “The Homemade Blended Formula Handbook,” with nutrition advice, parents stories, and philosophy about how “tube feedings are part of meal time too.”

We had already started giving Lucas tastes of apple juice and yogurt with his feeds, but the first shot of raw kale and peaches mixed in with his breast milk seemed like a big deal (if only for the pretty green color flowing through the tube.)  We did some more research and figured out that kale, especially raw, may not be the best thing to start off with, so this week we steamed some carrots, blended them into a fine pulp in the Vita-mix, and sent them through the tube, again mixed with milk.  Other than some funny-colored poop, Lucas seems to be handling the new routine wonderfully.

A bag full of carrot-orange goodness for Lucas