Because we don't even know if there's a problem yet.
At the beginning of the month Jaron had his 15 month well-baby visit. He's perfectly healthy and is even a little advanced in his development, particularly his verbal abilities. But...
He has now completely dropped off the CDC and even the WHO growth charts.
He's flatlined. In 3 months he gained barely 8oz. his growth curve turned into a straight line. Not something that they want to see at this age.
At every other well-baby visit since he was 3 months old has been a weight concern, at first we had issues with foremilk/hindmilk imbalance, then he became so active that he was burning more calories than he was eating. He was still ok, he was just gaining slow and keeping to his own curve.
But at his last appointment he was diagnosed as Failure to Thrive.
My first reaction was panic that the state was going to get involved, that I'd lose my kids. Our pediatrician, Dr. C, was very quick to reassure me that the state only got involved in "Failure to Thrive Due to Neglect" and this was definitely not the case. But aside from that, even though Dr. C told me that I was doing everything I could, it's so hard to hear "Failure to Thrive" and not understand "Mommy Failure."
Dr. C has referred us to a Gastrointestinal Specialist. He says the GI Dr may want to just watch him and give us ways to up calorie intake, or do bloodwork, or run other tests. In our ped's opinion, Jaron is just little and burning more calories than he's eating and he just wants to get Jaron checked out to confirm.
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| Now he gets a WHOLE Donut...not that he eats it all... |
I still can't help but wonder if I've done something wrong, not offered enough food, given him the wrong kind of food, something. His GI appointment is March 12th, still 2 weeks away. So I'm cooking with butter, giving him milkshakes and trying to get him to eat as much as possible.
And he's still breastfeeding. Some days more than others. We were in the process of partial weaning, I was trying to get him down to just nursing for bed, naps, and early morning. Now I don't know. One school of thought is to continue working towards that goal so that during the day he is eating a lot of calorie packed food while another says pack him full of breastmilk and get calories in him that way.
I'm just not sure how calorie packed my milk really is. It's always had very little fat separation when I pump and refrigerate. And as active as he is...going non-stop all day, at 16 months. I worry. How can I not?
I guess we'll see in 2 weeks what the GI Dr says. Because I sure don't know what to do at this point.
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