a year since surgery

This past weekend, Sawyer decided to walk. Now he walks all day long and gets so excited with being able to come and go as he pleases.

On Memorial Day he was aggressively putting his hands on my plate of BBQ food. I fed him some of my potato salad. He looked at me and said "mmm!" So he kept opening his mouth, and I'd keep putting bits of potato salad on his tongue. Then as I was eating a brownie, he did the same thing. When he took a bite of the brownie he said "mmm!" again. Part of me thought he was taunting me, and part of me was convinced this was his way of telling me he's ready to eat food like a big boy.

The  next day I was determined to skip tube feeding as much as possible and have him eat all the baby food that's been sitting on a shelf in the pantry. We tried a jar and ten minutes later, it looked like this:

I decided to bake a pan of brownies, just for him. Perfect form of calories, in my opinion.

I was able to skip all of Tuesday and Wednesday's daytime tube feedings!! I run the pump at night, every three hours. I offer something to him about every two hours throughout the day and go off of his mood. Sometimes he wants baby food, sometimes he just wants fruit loops. Sometimes he wants cheese cubes, sometimes he wants chocolate milk. All in all, he is being really cooperative with this new adventure. He is more smiles, he has enough teeth to conquer textures and crunchy food, and of course, his ability to cruise around the house on his own two feet gives him the most joy I've seen yet.  It's encouraging to me to see him take huge steps like this.