Feeding Routine while at work!

Our routine is simple - just need to make sure his "to-go" bag has everything we need. His "to-go" bag includes his Portable Bailey Chair, Magic Bullet Blender, Prilosec and Bethanechol, Towels, Timer, Bowl and a Lickety-Stick.  We do soak the food in the Magic Bullet at home and bring Knox Blox from home when possible.



We run a haunted house company (www.carnivalofhorrors.com) in October - so Sidney is there a lot with us - but his Megaesophagus feeding routine isn't affected.

Happy 5th Birthday Little Buddy!

It seems like only yesterday we were told Sidney would not live past 10 weeks old!  He turned 260 weeks old today!  Looking forward to the next 260 weeks and beyond!  I hope anyone who reads this can see that even if your best friend has this horrible condition called Megaesophagus, it IS NOT A DEATH SENTENCE!

Happy Birthday Sidney.

Sidney's Weight

We took Sidney and Butters to the vet last week for some shots they needed and weighed them both.  Butters weighed 59 pounds (she is 15 months old) and Sidney was down to 43 pounds (he is 4 1/2 years old).  At one point Sidney weighed 55 pounds.  This was of course before we brought Butters into our home. 

While we exercised Sidney as much as we could - he gets way more exercise playing with Butters and has dropped around 12 pounds over the past year.  I don't attribute this to MegaE really, the current drop at least, just burning way more calories that he used to.

Sidney doesn't look super skinny, in fact at 55 pounds he was considered overweight for his size.  So we now need to get more calories into his diet.  My concern with adding larger portions that is more than the 1 cup of Eukanuba Large Breed Dog Food he gets blended with 2 cups of water is the volume being so much.  Plus, we do not want to change his diet drastically, since our MegaE food and eating routine is working. 

So we are going back to the strategy that we had when he was a puppy and we were concerned with cramming calories into his food.  We are going to add a tablespoon scoop of the Eukanuba Puppy Weaning Formula to each meal and blend it with his food to add calories that are healthy, but not add volume to his meals.  Hopefully this will work, we may add two tablespoons if we think he needs more, but for now we will start with 2 meals:

1 Cup Eukanuba Large Breed Dog Food (Labrador)

1 Tablespoon scoop Eukanuba Puppy Weaning Formula

2 Cups Water

Blended to a milkshake consistency

30 Minutes sit time in his Bailey Chair

Fun Winter!

This winter we did a lot of outside activities like playing fetch in the snow and playing lots of ice hockey with Sidney and Butters.  While Sidney had a few regurgitation periods, nothing out of the ordinary really.  Sidney will turn 5 years old this September. 

Our upright feeding routine and meds has worked wonders for Sidney for over 4 and a half years and counting. We were curious how playing and exercising so much more with the addition of Butters to the family could throw off the schedule.  But it hasn't.  In fact, Butters knows that Sidney's feeding time in the Bailey Chair is his time.  She doesn't bother him until he's done.

We haven't changed Sidney's routine for quite some time and will ride it out until we need to tweak it, if at all.  In the meantime, we will just treat both dogs the same, because realistically, the only difference is that Sidney eats vertically in a chair for 1 hour a day, the other 23 hours are just normal.  Sure he doesn't get treats or water from a bowl, but that doesn't seem to really matter.  What maters is that Sidney is living a normal life with his sister Butters.  Life is good!