Ava's Honey Bear

Our sweet little Ava has one curious, happy disposition. From birth, she has always been very interested in seeing what was going on...so much so that we struggled to get her to nurse longer than 5-7 minutes at a time. Thus, Momma was forced to nurse every 2 hours for awhile. At four months the doctor told us to start offering her a sippy cup in an attempt to get more liquids down her. Ava would have none of it. Thankfully, Ava is an amazing little eater when it comes to solids, but sippy cups and nursing, she really had no time for that!

We were at our wits end. Ava was having constipation issues and I was majorly concerned about dehydration since we literally only had to change her diaper maybe twice a day...we usually changed it more than that, but rarely was it wet enough to justify. So about two weeks ago, our friend Leigh Ann who is a speech pathologist told us that she thought she could help. SURE! We were refusing no ones help as we didn't know what else to do for Ava! So, Leigh Ann told us to go buy some honey, in a honey bear, and bring the empty honey bear container with us when we came to see her.

Off we went a couple of Saturday's ago to visit Leigh Ann and hopefully watch her perform a miracle. It took less than 5 minutes for Leigh Ann to teach Ava how to drink from her honey bear. I'm not kidding. I was so relieved! The honey bear works so well b/c we could squeeze it and show Ava that there was something she might want in the bear - and then b/c she sucks from the straw, she feels safer drinking from it. Good ole sippy cups tend to make babies throw their heads back and suck really hard - thus they tend to choke a bit and this is really what Ava would do when we tried to offer her a sippy cup. The honey bear worked wonderfully!!


So we are going on our second week with our new honey bear and it is working great. Ava stayed with Sassy one whole day and she took her milk from her honey bear (HUGE!) and even later that week she took milk for Grammy! We go through about 1.5 honey bears of juice a day. Ava still is having some constipation issues but I think when her body realizes that she will keep drinking liquid things will get better for her!

So we owe our friend Leigh Ann a great big THANK YOU! We are so relieved to have passed this milestone with Ava.