Christian's swallow study

It is hard to believe that it is already December. I don't seem to be updating this blog as regularly as I thought I would. It really seems like the kids just started school, and we had conferences. I cannot believe that Christmas is only 22 days away. I am so excited to celebrate the birth of our savior and be surrounded by our family. We have our tree up and all the decorations on it.
Christian still has what we have been calling "noisy breathing". He has coughing fits every morning when he wakes up. If you didn't know better you would think it was an old man who has smoked for 30 years when you hear him cough. (and there is NO SMOKING around him ever)
We went and saw a GI person a couple of weeks ago who scheduled a swallow study. This is because he spits up often and food regularly comes out his nose. She also said it would be a good idea to get a baseline of what the anatomy in his throat looks like. She could feel the rattling of his breathing when she put her finger on the side of his throat. We had the swallow study on Tuesday morning. They put barium in his food and then took x-rays (kind of) while I was feeding him to see how the food was getting from his mouth down his esophogus.
His food was going down his throat past his esophagus and then coming back up; then when Christian would suck his thumb he pushed the food back down. They did see some of the food going up his nasal cavity also which explains food coming out his nose. During the solids the food was very slow going down and they only saw one push towards the bottom. The tech said that there are usually three pushes to move the food along and his food seems to stay in his esophagus longer and takes a longer period of time to move downward. More like gravity is moving it. She said that this is probably why we see him spitting up an hour later and also why he sucks his thumb as it helps him to swallow. His thumb sucking is for a very functional purpose. Man, our kid is smart!! :) This was all with solids. When we gave him a bottle everything moved quicker and nothing was coming back up. So the issue is with solid foods and "thicker" foods and not with liquid.
We don't know if this is part of his noisy breathing, but this seems to be part of the puzzle. I am expecting a call from the GI dr to schedule an appointment to go over the test more and see what/where we need to go from here. We also have a follow up appointment with the ENT in a couple of weeks. I am not sure what will happen here since last time he was put on steroids for having inflammation around the vocal box and sent home for 2 months. I think I am going to have to be more pushy with them as the steroids were only for 10 days and we knew beforehand that they wouldn't do any good. Christian has also had 2 ear infections now in the past couple of months. So we shall see....