Counting Calories...

No, this isn't going to be a post where I complain about eating too much at Thanksgiving or how I need to lose weight.  Quick recap: Last month when we were at Children's with Juliana they wanted us to stay in the hospital so that they could monitor and journal her food intake for three days.  Ryan and I refused to keep her in the hospital for that, since we had done that for her first year of life (Ryan even provided them with a color coded graph for solids and liquids).  Since we are both (to be honest) nerds/science people we were more than capable of journaling her food intake outside of a hospital setting, so we were sent home with the hospital recommended "journal paper" (which I have to say is less detailed then the one we kept) and told to mail it in after we logged her food for three days.

Now, it isn't that we have been procrastinating doing this.  There really hasn't been a time when we had three consecutive days where we could log her food intake- we have to weigh her food before she eats it and after she eats it.  Since Juliana goes to day care five days a week, we definitely did not want to ask Theresa to worry about logging her food intake and there are only two days for a weekend.  So, that brought us to Thanksgiving.  Ryan brought home his scale that he uses at work and we started her journal on Thursday.  It really isn't that difficult.  The only thing we have to do is keep a close eye on her at the table, as she likes to feed the dogs her food instead of eating it herself.  It's not that we allow her to feed them from the table normally, because we don't, it's just this time we have to account for every piece of food.

I don't know what they hope to gain from this.  We told them that she eats age appropriate foods, just not enough.  Maybe that's what they will see from the journal.  We know she's not malnourished, because her bloodwork didn't show it.  Either way, I will be glad to have this done.  Thursday she is being evaluated by a nutritionist who hopefully will give us more ideas on how to add calories to her food- besides the obvious: fat.  Maybe she will be able to find value from the food log as well.  Who knows?  Anyway, for your amusement, I took pictures of the weighing of a cinnamon roll that we made as a treat for breakfast, and then both sides of the "official" food journal- as you can see, her food intake each day is quite different even though she's on an appetite stimulant (the first day is the bottom right corner, the second day is the middle picture, with day three right below it).