I can hardly wrap my head around this little cutie pie turning 2!!! Does time seem to be going faster and faster or it is just me?

It doesn’t seem that long ago that we brought Rafael home from the hospital.

So how has this boy been doing??

Overall he’s been doing great though there has been some disappointing and upsetting developmental backtracking . Remember that video of him being so excited to learn to stand? He was standing all the time, and looking like walking was on the near horizon.

And then – the holidays ended and he was back to daycare. He was continually sick and always seemed tired and weak. He completely stopped standing, let alone move forward with anything else. His physical therapist told me a couple of days ago that it’s like he’s gone backwards several months developmentally, which is exactly what I see.

That’s the hardest part about fostering, that sometimes I have to do something I don’t believe to be in his best interests because that’s what the system demands. I can see it’s daycare isn’t good for him, and yet I still have to do it because they think a child does better in an outside educational framework. I pushed hard for an extra year for him to be at home with me and got it, and have to remind myself to feel grateful we were able to delay daycare as long as we were.

An issue that’s been challenging for us is that Rafael has shown very little inclination to eat from the time we started offering him solids at 10 months. From that time, he never ate more than two teaspoons a day total and only of few very foods. Nothing sweet. Nothing mushy. Nothing too chunky. Cucumbers and rice cakes were the only constants he would agree to.

Though he was medically approved for a specialty formula from the time he was a small infant, we didn’t often give it to him because we used donated mother’s milk. Only when we ran out would we use the formula, and it was very apparent that he never got sick except when he had formula for more than two or three days.

Recently he went through a month long period of one cold after another, nothing serious in and of itself;  the daycare staff told me it’s typical for a child in his first year of daycare. But he wasn’t eating much and he was even throwing up small amounts of formula – and my husband finally said, that’s it, we’re getting him off this formula.

I worried, how can we do that when he’s hardly eating anything? I mean, this child doesn’t eat. The formula was my security blanket, to know he was getting nourishment.  My husband said, the formula is making him sick, we’ve got to give him something else.

I had thought of replacing his formula with chicken broth several months before, but his speech therapist said she didn’t want me to do that. That night, we went cold turkey on the formula.

He was a very unhappy child for about a day and a half, during which time he very reluctantly would drink some small amounts of chicken soup from his bottle. But within two days, he was feeling much, much better. He suddenly was healthy again.

Not only that, suddenly he wanted to eat.  A lot. It was crazy and striking and amazing.

He began to intently watch everyone eating and literally overnight started to motion to have that food. And then he’d finish it, and have more. And then more of something else. After 14 months of trying and trying so many different foods and so many different ways to get him to eat, it was miraculous. I was afraid to believe it, afraid it was just a fluke.

But it wasn’t. And a couple of days after that, he stood up for the first time in six weeks.

So that’s all been very recent and very exciting!

The next thing that I’m working on is getting his sleep adjusted. Before he went to daycare, he would take a morning and afternoon nap, and sleep through the night. He was generally an extremely happy and good natured baby.

Then that all changed. He stopped sleeping through the night and the much shorter nap he had at daycare was much less than he was getting at home. He has been really grumpy and miserable when I pick him up, purely as a result of exhaustion. I estimated he was losing about 3 hours of sleep daily. That’s a LOT.

But by the time he gets home it’s mid afternoon and too late in the day for another nap.  So that’s the challenge right now which I feel very optimistic about resolving.

I don’t have a camera but my oldest daughter came by for dinner tonight and I asked her to snap some shots to share with you in honor of his birthday.

Rafael has a way of showing very clearly his feelings for someone. When he sees someone he loves, his face lights up and he reaches both hands out to him- my boys love being the one to pick him up from daycare because they are then the recipient of his beaming smile and outreached hands.

Oh, my gosh, how we love this boy!

Avivah