He's on the juice!

Yup, we've started Little Quinn on the juice. We figure that if The Juice could turn a cancer-survivor into an unstoppable Tour de France juggernaut, it could do wonders for our cerebral palsy-afflicted son!

OK, I'm kidding. We all know that Lance Armstrong isn't doping, and neither is Little Quinn. But we have begun incorporating real food into his feedings, in the form of fruit and vegetable juice.

We recently acquired a juicing machine from my sister-in-law (it was a duplicate wedding gift, I think), after we (well, mainly The Wife, but I support the idea) had done research on the feasibility of using juice in some or all of Little Quinn's feedings. Basically, the idea is that it's probably better for his digestive system, and maybe his body entirely, if he actually gets some food that isn't in the form of a powder formula that's manufactured in a plant via some kind of chemical process that involves real food at some early point in production.

On the advice of a chiropractor/nutritionist to whom we've been taking Little Quinn since shortly after we first brought him home from the hospital, we've been making a couple of his feedings a day from a certain amount of juice blended with a protein powder, a couple of vitamin supplements, and flax seed oil. It tends to be kind of nasty-looking stuff -- the carrot-juice potion is an unpleasant orange, and I'm not looking forward to seeing how the spinach stuff ends up looking. Ick.

So far Little Quinn has enjoyed this concoction based on the juice of carrots, grapes, and peaches, with nectarines, apples, and spinach waiting in the wings. Aside from some fairly large "fillings of the diaper" after the grapes, he seems to have had no problems digesting this stuff -- in fact, it seems that he's digesting it all easier than the manufactured formula, since when I go to vent his stomach for the next feeding after a juice-based feeding, his stomach turns out to be much emptier than usual. Also, his skin complexion seems better and he seems more energetic, spending less hours in deep slumber during the day (today being an exception to this; he's friggin' zonked right now).

Of course, if he's going to be a real Buffalo baby, I gotta figure out how to puree some chicken wings and cram them through his G-tube. I'll find a way. The wing, after all, has a lot of natural gelatin, which is why properly cooked chicken wings are so wonderfully juicy. Stay tuned....