Carter, Drink Your Moo!

Howdy! So I noticed it's been about 11 months since I last wrote anything on my blog. I think that's kind of pathetic. I'm not going to set a resolution concerning the blog because in my experience, resolutions are made to be broken. I'm simply going to set a goal. My goal is to post once a week. I think that will give me time to come up with ideas to post about because honestly posting more than once a week might be boring for all you readers out there who put up with my sporadic blogging :-)

Now, in the past I've used this blog to talk about my sons and their PKU and how we sometimes struggle as a family. Well, today we are struggling with one aspect of PKU so if you don't mind, I'll just post about that. So since Colby and Carter can't eat a lot of foods, they drink a formula (similar to baby formula) three times a day to give them the nutrition they need. This has not been an issue until lately. The boys both drank a formula called Periflex Jr. for some time now. This formula is made by a company that I believe is located in Europe (maybe England) and they charge a huge amount of money for one case of formula. Fortunately insurance considers the formula the boys' "medicine" so they cover 80% of the cost. The 20% we cover is about $90 a month per kid so that gives you an idea of how much the formula costs before insurance. And honestly they can charge as much as they want because I'm pretty sure it's the only company that makes this formula.

Well anyway, they decided to "improve" their formula. So now it's called Periflex Jr. Plus. What makes it better? Who knows. Colby never had to drink the Plus formula because his nutritionist switched him to Periflex Advance since he's getting older and bigger. We switched Colby to Advance with nary an issue. Carter, on the other hand, has had to switch to Plus. And? HE. HATES. IT. I've tried slowly transitioning. Nope. His nutritionist sent us flavors (orange and berry). Nada. Lately I've been putting hershey's chocolate syrup in it. That sort of worked okay, but not really. He maybe drank half of his cup. Before I handed him his formula and he just chugged it. Now it's like "Carter drink your moo" every five seconds. It's exhausting...for me.

So what to do? Well, at the last PKU picnic we picked up some samples of Lophlex. This is a pre-made fruity kind of formula that comes in a pouch similar to those pouches of applesauce that you can get at the grocery store. We let him try it a while back and he seemed to like it and I'm currently trying to get some more samples so that we can make sure he definitely likes it. It is my hope that this will work better than the Periflex Jr. Plus. I don't know if it's doable or not, but if he likes the Lophlex I'd like to send back the cases of Periflex Jr. Plus and get them replaced with the Lophlex, but insurance might be an obstacle on this. We might just have to eat the cost, but we'll see.

Anyway, now you have a glimpse of our issues with PKU. Send up a little prayer that we can get this worked out soon. I'm going to lose my mind if I have to beg Carter to drink his formula any more! And now you also know why I'm praying that Baby Gill does NOT have PKU!