Unholy gag reflex

K has an unholy gag reflex.

It is one of those special qualities that really makes life unique with our wee girl.  Starting as a brand new tiny newborn, within hours K started making this frightening (yet funny) scrunched up frog-looking face.  Due to some feeding issues (another post for another day) it took us a bit to catch on to the fact that she was having some reflux problems.  It took a good few months to get feeding and sleeping into a compatible process that would cause a minimum of exorcist style projectile vomiting incidents.    She did in fact sleep upright in a supported baby swing for approximately the first 7 (!) months of her life. 

Fast forward to somewhere around 10-14 months and K had successfully moved into her crib, but we were having no luck with falling to sleep on her own, staying asleep, or self soothing through whimpery REM transitions.  Yeah, we tried the whole sleep training gig and not only did her intense stubbornness outlast her parents, but we discovered that when she escalated from “I’m crying and I’m not happy” to “I’m crying my head off and I’m really REALLY mad now” always triggered a massive projectile vomiting episode.  After many nights of intense sleep deprivation + clean up crew, we had no choice but to backpedal and restrategize.

Well, today she still has some sleep issues (yep, this will warrant another post someday too) but overall, does much better now.  Unfortunately though, her gag reflex has not improved.  Whenever she has a cold with a cough, we can expect a few incidents.  Ditto if she is required to take any medicine that has an “unapproved” flavor.  Ditto if she gets upset/hurt and cries really hard. 

And lastly, ditto if she gets so much as a molecule of food substance in her mouth that she is suspicious of/disliking.  This is the hardest to deal with because with a little bit of insisting, she will usually actually taste new foods.  But as soon as it gets into her cute little mouth, she recoils, gags and even sometimes goes into full force vomiting.  Sometimes, even if she has eaten something she likes and takes one…bite…too…many, thar she blows.  I apologize wholeheartedly to the Target store in Las Vegas where we stopped into the food court to get her a snack last January.   Oh and preschool is really an adventure because they have a “one taste” rule for snack period.  She tells me nonchalantly on the way home from school the other day “we had popcorn for snack but I made a little frow-up”.

This as you can imagine, makes it very hard to expand her extremely narrow food palette, which causes me great parental emotional turmoil.  For the time being, we are focusing on the pediatrician vetted strategies of modeling diverse food habits, frequently and repeatedly offering servings of blacklisted food, involving her in cooking, and occasionally slipping nutritious food bits into familiar and acceptable habitats.  It’s tough though, as her suspicion is always in force.  What other 3 year old eyes a spoonful of vanilla ice cream like a potential enemy and uses the very tip of her tongue like a fine-tuned spectrograph before actually imbibing?!