Kim's Story, Chapter 6: The Skinny Begins

Kim’s Story, Chapter 6:
The Skinny Begins
Oil in her bottle, 8 meal days
and other vain attempts to make her fat.

I felt as if I was the worst mom of young children ever.

Our oldest son never was heavy enough to please the doctors, and always hit too low on the charts for both height and weight.

I knew they thought I was starving him, and distant relatives even heard that as a fact.

Could that make any caring mom desperate to raise a healthy child have warm and fuzzy feelings about herself?

It traumatized me to think family and friends would believe I could neglect a child.

Then our second son was born and he gained weight from day one. He was 20 pounds at 6 months, and loved to eat.

That gave me the courage to try again.

Surely I knew the secret to having a fat child now, and it would work the third time around.

But that isn’t what happened.

Kim’s Story: Our Journey on the Spectrum

We’ve shared about Autism Spectrum Disorder before, here, here and here, but now we decided to tell Kim’s story, and our journey on the spectrum (without knowing we were there). Because when a child is on the spectrum, the journey involves the whole family. This article studies the effects of autism on the family.

To start at the beginning read this post, then follow the links.

This begins “Chapter 6”.

Kim’s Story Chapter 6: The Skinny Begins

To state it like a cliché, Kim tipped the scales at 5 pounds 8 ounces when she was born. That’s barely tipping the scales, isn’t it? At least she was just heavy enough not to be considered a preemie, which kept us out of the experience of that hospital nursery. And she was physically strong and healthy, so she didn’t need any type of medical intervention.

Kim was an easy baby. By that I mean she hardly ever cried, even when she was hungry. I had to start noting the clock so I would remember to feed her. At least when my body didn’t tell me it was time. She would lay quietly in her bassinet, sucking on her thumb and forefinger. Somehow her tummy didn’t relay the message to her brain that she was hungry. As I said before, her brother just older than her loved to eat. He never forgot to let me know when he wanted food. Even our first child, who remained smallish, always ate good sized portions. So this switch caught me unawares.

At her first check up the doctor said she was healthy and seemed well, but she had lost a couple of ounces. That wasn’t an option. After that we got quite religious about feeding her.

Or trying to. She would eat what she wanted, then quit. There was no nudging or encouraging her to eat more. When she was done, she was done.

At her three month check up the doctor was concerned. Kim hadn’t doubled her birth weight, which is kind of a chart-line they followed at that time. Maybe still do. Instead of 12 pounds at three months, she was somewhere around 10. The doctor suggested supplementing with bottles in-between her regular nursing times. Bottles with oil in the formula for added calories!

I was excited to begin this experiment.

We would get our little sweetie fattened up in no time. I have to say here that we were used to how she looked, and didn’t think she looked too skinny or weak. We were used to her lean look, and since she was strong and healthy, we weren’t very worried. There had been skinny babies in my family’s past, and Kim’s daddy hadn’t been very big, either. I don’t remember even my worrywart sister-in-law making any comments about Kim’s weight.

But the scales. They spoke the truth, and I didn’t like the low numbers it kept showing us.

So I bought bottles and nipples and formula and the very healthiest oil. I carefully prepared a bottle, and added the prescribed amount of oil. An hour and a half after her first nursing session of the day, I sat down on the rocker and told her she was going to get fat.

She blew me off. She wouldn’t even suck the nipple of the bottle. I coaxed and cajoled and cried and… nothing. She wasn’t hungry, and she wasn’t going to eat. Was there any way she could have absorbed my own utter disgust at putting oil into formula, which I thought I was successfully hiding? I could never swallow any fat from meat, even bacon, so how could I expect her to drink oily milk? Sigh. I suppose that might be partly what happened, although she could have inherited my taste aversions just as much as absorbed my (hidden) attitude.

And when a baby trusts you to feed her only the best, and snuggles happily in your arms – as long as you’re not trying to force her to eat – what do you do? We gave it our best shot, but she never did reach the bottom line of the baby weight charts. Consoling ourselves that she was average on the height charts didn’t quite mean the same thing.

And that’s the skinny of her early months.

It set a precedent that continued until her early teens, which is another part of this story. Which I can’t imagine even trying to tell at this point.

But even though those months held some worry about her weight, we were blissfully expecting the best. In every other way she was keeping up with normal growth progression, and we loved our baby girl so very much.