The stars were aligned

Last night was an exciting night. We went out for dinner and decided to brave fate by eating at what I dub a "sit-down" restaurant. Some of you may recognize that term. I don't exactly know where it came from but what it means is a restaurant that has a waiter who comes to take your order and brings you your food. It's not a buffet (our restaurant choice of late b/c it doesn't matter if the food gets cold when baby fusses, you can always get more) nor a fast food restaurant. Anyway, we rarely eat at them these days, as I describe in another post. Last night Kaia was very fussy before we left the house. I was concerned that it was going to be a bad dinner experience. However, once we got to the restaurant she was fine.

A couple things helped. First, we went to Applebees. We had never been there with Kaia in tow. They have great highchairs. None of those generic wooden high chairs. These actually were a little more supportive and allowed her to sit closer to the table. I also brought more goodies in her goody bag. She had her crayons (the hostess also gave her some), several books, a dolly, etc. And her favorite: a shaky ring rattle that fits perfectly into a generic onion soup mix box. She loves to take it out, shake it, and put in back in. Over and over.

I broke out her rubbermaid straw cup with her thickened milk and she did the usual - completely rebuffed it and continued playing. She played nicely throughout our whole meal and charmed the manager and server as I described in the post below.

Then we got our dessert. One of those dessert shooters things. The hot fudge sundae kind.

Kaia has been entranced with our adult metal spoons for a while now. She has been working on scooping with them in therapy and with us outside of therapy. She's got the scooping thing down cold. She just won't bring the food to her own mouth. She will feed us, the dolly, or fling it to the floor, but she won't feed herself. Last night, at the restaurant, she still wouldn't feed herself with the spoon. Frankly, I wouldn't even let her try there b/c it would be a huge giant fling fest mess.

But, the look on her face when she finally let me give her a taste of the ice cream. It was like this surprised, "wow, what in the world is this tasty concoction - I never knew food could taste like this" look. So we bribed with the ice cream in order to sneak in bites of all her other food, and she ate like a champ.

This wasn't the first time that we've given her ice cream, but really the first time that we've gotten that reaction from her. After I had just told her nutritionist, OT, and speech therapist that against all standard therapy advice, she didn't like cold stuff. Truth is, for the past few weeks, she hasn't. Of course, just when we think we've got Kaia figured out, she changes the rules of the game.

I'm not sure that this is the best way to feed her (bribing with bites of ice cream), but at least she ate. At a restaurant. I consider that progress.