Drinking Responsibly

One of the hardest things for me to understand has been John's drinking problem. The kid is a pretty hardcore drinker, between 21 and 30 ounces a day and is always ready for more. Of course he doesn't want to drink his formula, and who could blame him, and would prefer to drink whatever we are drinking thus Mark and I have kicked the Coke Cola habit completely because John doesn't do well with much sugar and corn syrup is the perfect thing to grow nasty little yeasty infections in, but mostly he'd just prefer to drink plain old water. The IRP team has encouraged us to move him to ORS, a non-flavored Gator-aid kinda thing, comes in a powder and we mix it with water. John has turned his nose up at this repeatedly. Finally the poor IRP doc had all she could put up with and told me that John's excessive binge drinking has got to stop and I'm the parent and I have to make him quit. Ouch! Finally she and Brandy the nutritionist explained that because water is hypotonic, basically doesn't have anything in it, it's very hard for John's short little gut to absorb and it is basically giving his nutrients and such a faster ride out of his system. So with better understanding of the devastating effects of his drinking issues, I sat John down and explained to him that ORS was his new drink, I knew he didn't like it but that was just tough, sometimes, more often than not we have to do things we don't like. Of course I put it in better 4 year old terminology, but he took the cup containing the hated ORS from me and gave it a shot, yuck. An hour later he was thirsty, I gave him the cup again and again yuck. That was a week ago, at this point he's going through nearly a liter of ORS a day, and seems to have sworn off of plain water, even bath water, thankfully. Brandy the nutritionist called and gave me a recipe for homemade ORS with orange flavor, I'll post that on the other blog in case anyone wants to make themselves some home made orangey gator-aid type liquids. I made this concoction for John yesterday, yuck, today he asked for orange juice, I gave him this and he swilled down the whole cup. So on Tuesday we'll find out if switching John's libation of choice now makes his binge drinking okay with the team or if he needs a 12-step program ;)