Who is Ayden?

Ayden is a 5-year-old boy with Autism that has NEVER really enjoyed the taste of food.

Backstory:
Hello! Thanks for visiting our blog. My name is Deanna. I have a wonderful family! There is my husband Antonio and two boys, Ayden (5) and Micah (2). We live in a small city in Arkansas named Jonesboro. My son Ayden is why we are here in Atlanta and why I am even doing this. Let me give you a real quick backstory on Ayden and what brought us to Atlanta.
I had Ayden while I was only 23 weeks pregnant. I was later diagnosed with have an incompetent cervix which caused my water to break and Ayden to be born prematurely. Ayden had a very “dramatic” entrance into this word. He spent nearly the first 11 months of his life at Arkansas Children’s Hospital in Little Rock, Arkansas.  If we want to be technical, he was born at the UAMS Medical Center in Little Rock and spent one month there first. When Ayden finally came home, he was on a ventilator with a trach, oxygen, and a G-Tube.  
Ayden started therapy services while still in the NICU. Occupational therapy started doing tasting feeds with Ayden when he was five months old. Still, it started slow and with tiny amounts. My husband and I wanted to start trying to feed Ayden by mouth then. Still, his physicians at the time were against risking any aspiration or reflux that could negatively affect his lungs or his airway. They made sure that the priority was his lungs and not feeding therapy. We understood that and allowed feeding by mouth to take a back seat for a while.
Over the years, Ayden has had several great Speech and Language Pathologists and Occupational Therapists work with him during his journey of learning to eat by mouth. Unfortunately, nothing ever had long-lasting results.
Skipping ahead, 2018 was an eventful year for our family. In the Spring of that year, Ayden was diagnosed with having cerebral palsy - spastic quadriplegic (later diagnosed as spastic- diplegic) and shortly after that, with Autism. He can speak but is considered non-verbal. I thought my world was starting to cave in for a while, but then I thought of all the good things that happened that year as well. Ayden was able to get decannulated (had his trach removed), and later in the year, he was able to have the stoma closed! We had the birth of our youngest son Micah, and Ayden completed the year out by starting to walk. He literally closed the year out with walking, like December 29th or 30th.
So, after several years of working on feeding with Ayden, traveling around the state of Arkansas, and inconsistent results, we knew we needed to seek more help. Our excellent primary care physician, Dr. Jane Sneed of the Children’s Clinic in Jonesboro, AR, recommended that we look at intensive feeding programs. She told us there were no programs in Arkansas, but if we were willing and able, she felt that approach to feeding would be the best path for Ayden. So, the search began.
I could NOT believe the difficulty of finding somewhere that offered intensive feeding therapy and how far the closest ones to me were. I was starting to get desperate and willing to do anything for him. We looked at three different programs that were all scattered around the country. All the information posted about each program highlighted each one as “the best.” What I could not find was testimonial info from families that had been to those places. I wanted to know what the families felt about the process of getting into the program and know was it worth it for them. I wanted to know how they handled the personal logistics of participating in the programs. I wanted to know the good and the bad that the official sites of these programs would not tell you. Since I never found anything, I said to myself that I would create something following our journey and hopefully help another family.
I am NOT a professional blogger. I am NOT a professional writer. I can guarantee that you will find misspellings, typos, incorrect grammar, irrelevant ramblings, etc. Please forgive me in advance. I don’t’ have an editor, and I have never set up a web page before. I am learning. Instead of judging, please pay attention to the messages I am sending. For those that want to keep up with Ayden’s progress and learn something about this program, WELCOME! Please send any questions you may have! Thanks for reading our story.