Facing the Cheerios Bowl

I love to watch Rachel eat cold cereal.

That may sound strange to you, although if you’ve been reading along you probably know that I have some story to share with you that makes it sound far from strange but rather inspirational, victorious and possibly tear-jerking; I will not disappoint. :)

You see, one of the blessings of having a child with special needs is receiving special services.  Ahhhhh, special services.  Seriously, I don’t know how the rest of you parents navigate early parenthood without this valuable resource!  Every other week we had trained professionals with degrees of higher education in the areas of early childhood education, special education, occupational therapy and more visit our home.  They gave us advice, worked with Rachel on daily living skills, taught us how to work with Rachel and answered my plethora of questions about babies and their development.  Sometimes these questions were related to Rachel’s diagnosis, sometimes they were a desperate plea for help with figuring out how to get Rachel to sleep through the night.  No matter the question, they always had wonderful, helpful answers backed by years of therapy experience, book learning and individual research.  I could not have done parenting without this support team.

One of the many things that I learned from our lead development specialist was how much work it takes for the mouth and brain to learn how to eat cereal with milk.  In order for this intricate feat to take place without food spilling all over the muscles need to work together to simultaneously push the solid food to the front of the mouth while swishing the liquid food to the rear of the mouth and manage to not swallow the liquid nor spit out the solid.  Then it has to tell the jaw to chew it carefully so that each component of the mouthful stays in it’s designated location.  The tongue also has to work up and down while the jaw chews and yet still help to create a seal at the front of the mouth to keep the food and liquid from oozing out of the mouth.  It is a complex muscular task that we tend to take for granted.  To a typical mouth this action is fairly intuitive and doesn’t necessarily take training, but to a mouth with low muscle tone and oral-motor skills that like to do their own thing, eating cereal in a civilized manner is nothing short of triumphant.

It was a long time before Rachel would even try cereal with milk; on some level she seemed to know that it was going to take a lot of work, and she didn’t want to work she just wanted to eat.  Who could blame her?  I’d coax her with airplane-spoons that zoomed and performed loops while on course to her mouth, but she was too smart for me and not beguiled by my trickery.  Occasionally I was sneaky enough to get the spoon in her mouth, but the contents were immediately spit out as her oral muscles revolted against the unfair labor that was being asked of them.  After a while I just stopped trying and figured that maybe she would just be an oatmeal eater all the days of her life.

Then one day, it happened.  I was eating a bowl of Cheerios on the couch when Rachel toddled up to me to see what I was doing.  She peered over the side of my bowl and pointed to my cereal then looked questioningly at me and signed the word “eat?”

“Do you want some of mommy’s cereal, Rachel?” I queried.

Rachel nodded emphatically with a sizeable smile on her face.

So, we went for it.  Spoon loaded with oaty cereal and just enough milk to not spill over the stainless steel brim, I steered carefully toward her eagerly awaiting mouth.  In went the spoon and her lips closed down, scooping the contents into her mouth.  I held my breath as I watched her tiny face; her lips pursed tightly and I watched as her mandibles chomped up and down, up and down—no spillage.  Chomp, chomp, chomp, swish, swish, swish—she even maneuvered a slick cheek-to-cheek exchange of food with not a drip of milk slipping between her lips.  Chew, chew, chew, swallow.  SUCCESS!!  With a grin she opened up her tiny little mouth and vigorously gave me the sign for “more”.

I cried.  Sure it sounds silly, but I sat there with my cereal bowl and empty spoon in hand and shed tears of joy and triumph.  I gave her a big squeeze and told her how proud I was of her heroic accomplishment then proceeded to feed her the entire remaining contents of my bowl.  Those five minutes of my life were filled with such intense and unexpected joy, and to this day I can’t help but smile every time I watch her eat cereal.  To me it is a symbol of what a girl with odds stacked against her can accomplish, and I feel privileged to be the one who gets to cheer her on.