Feeding Tate

Before Tate received his feeding tube, and before we found that food was getting into his lungs, we had to feed him in a very non-traditional way. One of the nurses at St. Marks figured it out and although it was a lot of work, Tate was able to eat with a bottle.

It involved squeezing both of his cheeks together to help him create a seal around the bottle and then finding a bottle that we could squeeze the food into his mouth. We tried every bottle that was ever invented until we found one that allowed us to give him his food at a slow and steady rate.

As a side note, these bottles were very expensive and Brandi stocked up on them to make sure we always had enough. As our luck would have it, the shipment of bottles came about the same time we found out that Tate was aspirating the food and we would have to only feed him through the feeding tube. So, we were left with a bunch of expensive bottles that we couldn’t use any more.

We would feed him as much as we could and when Tate decided he was done, we would put the rest of the food through his feeding tube. We had to use Thick Em to thicken up the food in his bottle so that he wouldn’t aspirate and by doing that it meant that we couldn’t just pour out the remaining food into a syringe and put it down his feeding tube. We had to measure how much food was left and then mix up some new food to put it down the syringe.

This process took about an hour and a half and we were expected to feed him every 3 hours. This means when Brandi was alone she would have one and a half hour spurts to take care of everything else the kids needed before the feeding process would begin again. Luckily we received a lot of help. It was a relief when we finally had Tate on a pump that would feed him throughout the day through his feeding tube and Brandi would have a little more time to direct our crazy life.

Brandi is such an amazing Mother! When others would have fallen apart, Brandi just kept helping the kids with a huge smile on her face. All of this while recently being called as the primary President in our ward and doing an exceptional job with the primary. I married way up. Tate loved his super mommy!