Feed me, Seymore!

My little firecracker never ceases to amaze me, when I think she isn't ready to learn something or she won't cooperate with her therapists on a new task. As some of you already know, Faith has a feeding tube, places 3 days after her first birthday. Feeding her was like participating in a marathon. Most days, feeding took up about 8 hrs! We would feed her about every 4 hrs and a feeding could easily be 2 hrs or more! At first we refused the feeding tube but after a yr of this we couldn't take it anymore. Well, the tube worked great putting weight on but alas, we did not continue to force the feeding thing, like we should have. So now, she doesn't swallow voluntarily. As I have talked about before, she spent 8 weeks in an intensive feeding program in Atlanta in 2007, but we had minimal success. So, after the dx of her tumor that summer we quit pushing feeding all together. We quit feeding therapy, stopped forcing food in her mouth, stopped oral motor exercises (exept speech stuff). Well, after all this time, she has suddenly decided that she wants to EAT!!! She has started begging for our food, putting her hands in our plates, pretending with spoons and plates(like she's eating!)!
Which brings me to tonight. At dinner, we started putting her back in her booster seat and giving her a plate and spoon. Tonight we put a few broken up noodles w/ sauce on her plate and she dillegently tried her best to figure out how to get noodles on a spoon and then take them to her mouth. Now, she still isn't swallowing anything, but this is such a BIG DEAL! She gets so excited if she gets a taste of something, anything! I tried giving her a taste of a green bell pepper last night and she went "MMMMMMMM" like it was ice cream or something! It was sooo FREAKING cute! Every time she got it in her mouth we would break into voratious cheers and dance all around the table, and she would just laugh and dance with her hands. I don't want to jinks us but maybe she will eat one day, after all. I must say, I underestimated her and had pretty much given up on eating all together. She likes to do that kind of thing and surprise me, alot. I guess I should not make such quick assumptions (well, not quick after 5+ yrs!). She even begged for my cereal this morning. She is so darn cute, I could never deny her! Way to go, Faithy, keep me guessing, I can take it!