One of our struggles

I know this may sound just like a silly complaint but one of our biggest struggles since Anna has come home has been with food. I thank God everyday that I was able to find Kefir and that Anna will drink it. This is pretty much the only protein she will take on most days. I make light of the situation when I can but there is pretty much never a minute that goes by where I am not thinking "What was the last thing Anna has eaten." She is small and I think she always will be small. Anna is so active that she burns the calories up as soon as she takes them in.
I am very proud of her weight gains and I am always on the look out for a new way to add calories to her diet. This all goes back to the class party a couple of weeks ago. I asked to bring in my snow cone maker but the only problem was I did not own one. Off to the store to purchase one and much to my surprise I love it and use it pretty much everyday.

What I really wanted was an ice cream maker. I wanted one that did not require ice and that was not a million dollars. Imagine my surprise when I found one sitting next to the snow cone maker. I put both in my cart and proceeded with my internal dialogue of why I needed it. As crazy as it sounds I bought it anyway even though I know going into this that I might not use it all the time. I put the core into the freezer to freeze and left it there.

Fast forward now to the other day. I was at the grocery store and Anna asked for ice cream. Now this is something that I can pretty much always get her to eat. When I think of ice cream as most people do I think of it as a treat. But if she asks for a type of food I never deny her so I told her we were going to make ice cream instead. Anna is a bit like me and enjoys a nice project especially if there are steps involved more about that another day. She requested mint chocolate chip, so I picked up the cream, mint extract and the chips than we proceeded to head home.
I unloaded the bags on to the counter and it hit me. What if I added protein powder to the ice cream. Gerard drinks it and honestly it smells  really good. I decided that if it tasted yucky nothing was lost but a little cream and a little time. So I added the powder to the mixture. By my simple calculation each 1/2 cup of ice cream would now have an added 13 grams of protein which by the way is more than in a serving of chicken nuggets. We put the mixture into the maker and in 30 short minutes we had ice cream.

Here is to moment of truth did Anna eat it or did she turn up her nose with her classic "I can't like it!" Anna ate a little over 1/2 cup of ice cream. Each day she has asked for some more and today she finished off the batch of ice cream I made the other day. I feel a small victory in our struggle to get more protein into Anna. The addition of a protein shake is something that Anna's pediatrician has asked us to try but in the past Anna just would flat out refuse. Tomorrow I am planning on making another batch to have on hand. The other good thing is I am able to control the amount of sugar that is added to the ice cream. I wanted to blog about this just in case anyone out there is struggling with this as well.