The Straw Cup

I received a few emails about my last post, so I am just going to explain what we did to help encourage Dylan to use the straw cup.

If you have minimal interest in all things pertaining to straw cups, please feel free to skip this, as it might actually be the most boring post in the entire world. Ha!

So, after trying 732 different sippy cups, open cups, and nosey cups, I decided to give the ol' Honey Bear Cup a try. You may find one here. I liked this particular straw cup because I could actually squeeze the liquid right into Dylan's mouth. Our OT suggested only squeezing the liquid into his mouth when his lips are sealed on the straw - that way, he will learn that the only way to get the liquid is by closing his lips around the straw.

We started out with milk mixed with Thick-It. I do think that having the milk thickened helped Dylan, as it was much more manageable. Rather than having a thin liquid poured into his mouth (which caused him to choke), this was more like his baby food and he could move it around a bit better before swallowing. Plus, it went into his mouth more slowly and was probably a bit less overwhelming.

After some realllly nasty spit up incidences with regular cow's milk, I decided to switch to soy milk.

I'm guessing (and I am probably way off, as I seem to have a terrible sense of time) that we used the Honey Bear cup for about 3 months or so. I admit, I was getting very frustrated! It seemed that even when I did squeeze the milk into his mouth, he would then proceed to spit it all back out. I even resorted to putting a plastic bib on him - you know the kind with a built in pocket at the bottom? I remember taking it off him after each meal and sure enough, 99% of the milk was in the pocket at the bottom...

So, after a few months of that fun stuff, one day I decided to put the straw into his mouth without squeezing it at all to see what would happen. Lo and behold, he sucked the milk up completely by himself!! If you are still reading this, then I'm sure you can relate and comprehend just how freaking exciting that was!!!! Yeah!!

After he learned how to use the Honey Bear Cup properly, I bought him a real big boy straw cup. He didn't appreciate the switch at first, but after one day, he caught on to the new straw and actually barely spills any milk at all anymore.

I guess my advice would be to just keep practicing and practicing and practicing. I remember a while back a wrote a post about how I feared I must be "insane" because I kept doing the same thing over and over and over and expecting a different result. Well, thankfully our persistence paid off! I'm not insane after all! Yay! No seriously though, I wonder if a big part of this is just plain luck? Practice, consistency and a whole lotta luck!

Well...I hope that was somewhat helpful. If you have any other questions, please do not hesitate to email me. I'm not sure I know what I'm talking about, but I can certainly try to help.