Aria's Feeding Intensive

On February 1st, Aria, Shane and I set off for Gainesville, Florida. We had snagged a one-week intensive with Nancy Calamusa, owner of the New Jersey Pediatric Feeding Associates. She had been recommended years prior as one of the best feeding therapists in the country. Aria has made some great progress in feeding this past year, so the timing seemed perfect to finally travel to work with Nancy.

Nancy's intensives are hard to get into with her schedule for the entire year filling up within minutes. The very second her intensives for 2026 opened up, I was online ready to register. I lucked out getting two 1-week intensives with our first being in Gainesville, FL.

Honestly, feeding therapy has been my least favorite of the many therapies we've done. Progress is soooo slow that I've rarely seen gains even when doing a 3 week intensive, so I wasn't expecting to see any huge gains made in just 5 days with only 10 sessions. 

After a successful first session, my little Miss Sassy Pants did not at all want to participate in the next couple sessions. And when you only have 5 days to work with an amazing therapist, time is of the essence. I was loosing a bit of hope that she'd cooperate at all. This was, after all, a bit of a vacation for Aria being the only child for a whole week and having her Mama's full-time attention.

Aria is quite an opinionated little one and very orally defensive. I'm the only person who she trusts to feed her so it wasn't too surprising to see her putting up a bit of a fight. But thankfully by session #4, I started seeing some quite impressive things.

Like Aria deciding to give a new nipple for her juice bottle a try...

Aria taking bites out of an apple presented by Nancy...

 

And Aria chomping away on a chicken snack stick.

 

Aria managed to eat foods I would never in a million years have given to her. But Nancy had the faith and knowledge to push Aria a bit harder than any other feeding therapist (or her Mama!) have done in the past. It was quite impressive seeing Aria feed herself a piece of watermelon, pineapple and honeydew with no problems.

  

Overall, it was a very different feeding intensive than we have ever experienced in the past with techniques that we've never seen before. Now the tricky part will be implementing them at home and waiting to see progress, one baby step at a time.