Josh health and diet update

Thank you for your prayers for Josh! He is doing very well on the new diet now and we are going to continue moving forward with it. We had a rough start since he was not tolerating a lot of the introductory foods, but he’s now stabilized and digesting his diet of meat (restricted portions), pears, carrots, green beans, spinach, zucchini, butternut squash and avocado. We rotate out his meat so he does not have the same meat more often than every four days and in the coming weeks, we will get his fruits and veggies on a 3 day rotation. The rotation helps keep him from developing new allergies and intolerances since his immune system is prone to that. The meats I feed him are beef, chicken, turkey, lamb, pork and buffalo. Each day, I puree about a pound of meat with 7-8 cups of vegetables. I spoon the mixture onto a frying pan with a little oil and bake them into little “pancakes.” Josh will only eat them with a little browning, but he’s happy to have them each day. I serve them with boiled pears or pear sauce (home-made) and ½ an avocado. I also offer broth made from boiling the meat with vegetables. The broth is very healing to the gut. He is finally consuming some broth, but only because I put a little meat in the bottom for him to dig out and he ends up drinking a lot of the broth. It sounds like I am torturing him, but he is very happy with this new routine. I know he must feel better because he doesn’t ask for ANY of his old foods anymore. What three-year-old would be content to go to a birthday and kindly agree that they will not eat cake because it hurts their tummy? Well, it must hurt for him to agree. Anyway, it’s a lot of work to boil all these foods each day, but we’re finally getting into a groove and are happy with what we are seeing.


Josh is steadily progressing through his ABA programs. He is learning several adjectives like rough/smooth, hard/soft, big/little, hot/cold, etc.. He is learning his prepositions and continuing to work on classifying and grouping objects, utilizing them to learn WH questions. He has mastered “where” and ‘what” questions and is working on “why” questions. He struggles with the more abstract ideas like big and little and the “why” questions. He cannot understand that he is little next to Mommy, but big when he is next to Kate. He is frequently pointing at things and asking if they are big or little. I think it is interesting how his therapists teach “why” questions. Josh has been classifying objects into groups, identifying what things have in common, then working on negations, what doesn’t belong. They are now using those scenarios to ask why something doesn’t belong. For example, they will place out several cards of animals and a shirt. They will ask which does NOT belong and he will pick the shirt. Then, they ask why it doesn’t belong. He is supposed to say because it is not an animal. He is struggling with this and very frustrated that he can’t figure out what they want him to do, but he’s working hard and finally getting a few right.

At the beginning of the SCD diet change, we also ran a panel of blood work on Josh to check his IGE food allergies, liver function, mineral levels and the basic CBC testing. Our goal was to re-check nut allergies since they are a part of the later phases of SCD, and we wanted to check his liver function before we planned on doing chelation (protocol to remove toxic metals from his body). I already mentioned him being allergic to every nut you can name. We’ll continue to work with his nutritionist to create a custom diet plan. His liver checked out fine, but his thyroid levels were off and he has hypothyroidism, under-functioning thyroid. We started him on thyroid medication about 6 weeks ago and saw big gains with that as well. We decided to wait on chelating until late spring or early summer. The SCD protocol has rocked his body, but I think we rid his digestive system of a lot of bad yeast and bacteria. We have seen huge gains in language, cognition, gross and fine motor skills, social skills, AND with great excitement, I report that he sleeps through the night over 75% of the time now!!!! His bowel movements are consistently normal. That sounds gross, but it is such a relief since that is our biggest indication of how his stomach feels and to know he is properly digesting foods. It’s been a LONG time since we have seen normal diapers out of him.

Also, we actually have potty training news to discuss – a topic I didn’t imagine I would be writing about in a positive light. I attended a toilet training class for special needs the end of January. We had been trying to work with Josh on recognizing if his diaper was clean or dirty and going through the process of sitting on the potty. He used to only sit on the baby potty and I dreaded the day he actually peed on it because he was too big for there to be a chance of it going in! He was afraid of the big potty for a long time, but with the assistance of super big sister, Emma, we had him at least sitting on it. I took the training class on a Friday and by chance, the first time he actually peed on the potty was that weekend. He was so excited that he figured out what we wanted him to do! In the months since, we have moved all diaper changes to the bathroom and when we catch him going to the corner to do his business, we direct him to the bathroom. We had a roadblock when we were a few weeks into the diet changes, as it caused excessive urination. The volume was incredible and double diapering him didn’t prevent us from having to change the sheets at 3:00 AM. That has passed, for the most part, and we progressed to getting him to the potty before his usual corner times and eventually he started pooping on the potty too! We’re not close enough to go to underwear, but are very encouraged that we are progressing. He has even initiated going on his own twice in the last week. Woo hoo! I am praying we get him out of diapers before Kate is. :)

Thanks again for the prayers! We had an appointment with his nutritionist last week and at this point in time, we passed the hurdles that made us consider the elemental formula diet. Thank God! Next set of foods, here we come!

Picture of the week:  Josh wanted to wear Emma's soccer jersey.  I told him to ask her and she let him.  Emma asked me, "Mom, do you think Josh will be a tom girl?"