Food Tolerance Win: Saag Paneer!

With Leo, sometimes routine trumps all. I'm guessing that's why, after almost two years of me dipping naan in saag and handing it to him, he took over the damn saag-dipping himself.

And now our boy eats spinach voluntarily, just as he does his daily dose of cod liver oil. And his diet is a rounder arena than it once was. Now we just need to help our boy with some of his own roundness. He's got that pre-adolescent lingering chub thing going on. Cute, but just on the cusp of unhealthy, according to his pediatrician, with whom he had his annual exam two weeks ago.

I prescribe: More hiking! Hiking season resumed just two weeks ago:

We've had weird wet spring after a rather arid winter. It's been heaven for Seymour the mushroom forager -- his secret porcini & chanterelle spots are still productive -- but local trails are only now non-mucky. Apparently local drivers' skills are changeable as well, as this is what the entire side of our parked-on-the-street car looked like when we emerged from the oaken hillside:

I'm driving a rental while my car's entire driver's side exterior gets replaced. Mali was less concerned about our car itself than transferring her library copy of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince to the new car's CD player. Leo doesn't seem to mind driving in a different car. And I'm intrigued by this thing called "XM Radio" which lets one have single-theme channels like "Crappiest 80s Tunes." I can now blast fetid Rick Astley or painfully monotonous Nu Shooz at Iz if she and her friends try to use their iPods to flood the car interior with shallow shiny One Direction tunes.

Off to the annual school district fundraiser. I am tired. Hope you are well.

Pizza Anxiety

Pizza *&* naan on his birthday. Thx, Zante's!

Remember what a great thing pizza was for Leo? How it took an aeon of therapist-led food chaining to get him to eat it, how then he became such a fan that we we had pizza cake for his 10th birthday?

Unfortunately, Leo now likes pizza so much that he's developed a severe case of Pizza Anxiety. If he knows there's pizza in the house, he can't think of anything else, can't focus on anything else. If he knows there's leftover pizza from dinner, he gets agitated and has a hard time going to sleep. If he knows there's pizza in his lunch box at school, he cannot think or talk about anything else, not until that pizza gets nommed. No amount of visual supports, reassurances, or distractions help -- not at home, not in the classroom.

So, we've banned Wednesday Night pizza for now, which as a routine lover myself makes me fairly sad -- and also sad that this is so hard for our boy.

We can still get pizza in restaurants, at the Costco food court even -- any place the pizza loop opens and closes on site. But we can't have pizza at home, or at school for the time being.

Leo doesn't seem to mind so far, as again it's only when pizza is present that Pizza Anxiety escalates. And we'll try again in a few weeks.

As always, advice or insights appreciated,

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Apologies for being mostly absent, Leo being mostly absent from this site. No more publishing books during the winter holidays for me. (Have you bought your copy of TPGA yet? Check out the fabulous reviews we've been getting!  )

A Happy 10th Birthday Pizza Epiphany!

Look who's ten years old today! Doesn't he look handsome like his dad, and skeptical like his mom? I'll have to start telling him he's the world's most handsome boy instead of the world's cutest, because ten-year-old boys do not appreciate their mothers pinching their cheeks and clucking at them. Leo is no exception.

He had a fun bouncing birthday party, with many of our favorite people and families -- including several of his new classmates and their equally wonderful families. It was delightful. The picture above is him at the party, about to blow out his candles.

If you needed a double-take, let me reassure you -- that's not pizza, it's cake. A very symbolic cake. A cake that the party facility owners almost blocked because non-cake outside food is prohibited. A pepperoni pizza cake*. Which we made for him because, as of Halloween, he now eats pepperoni pizza! (And garlic chicken stuffed pizza, though its confection version is less striking.) Our lifelong vegetarian-by-choice boy is finally going to get some protein from non-legume, non-dairy, non-egg sources!

Why the leap to pepperoni, after a lifetime of gagging at the smell of meat? I do believe part of it is maturation. But mostly, I credit Judy McCrary Koeppen's, Leo's former SLP, and her guidelines for picky eaters. We used the idea of "food chaining" during more than a year of weekly pizza nights: first we got Leo to nibble on the pizza crust,  then on crusts with a bit of sauce, and then crusts with a bit of sauce and cheese (that took the better part of the year). And then suddenly he was demanding pepperoni pizza on Halloween. Was it a fluke? No, because this nomming picture is from the first weekly pizza night after Halloween, when he scarfed two pieces of the pepperoni stuff. You can see the nomming yourself in this video, which Seymour says is shot in PizzaCam. Our boy is a genuine pepperoni pizza convert (and spinach pizza, too).

Leo's pizza love means a milestone for the rest of his family, too. When we went out for pizza on the night of Leo's birthday party, Seymour noted that it was the first time ever our entire family ate the same thing for dinner. First time ever. Ever.

Our boy is not in stasis, that's for certain. I am hoping for more positive surprises and more happiness for him during this, his eleventh year on our big blue marble.

HAPPY 10th BIRTHDAY LEO!

*In case you were impressed by my creativity, know that I used the guidelines from the first Google hit for "pizza cake." Though I substituted healthy-ish carrot cake with cream cheese frosting, and used apricot fruit leather for the pepperoni.

He's the King of a House! And a Bush! And a Cat!

Check out this boy. I bet he's saying, "Oh marvelous me! For I am the ruler of all that I see!" While these projected thoughts mostly reveal how much Dr. Seuss we listen to in the car, my boy does rule.

His food tolerance continues to stretch and accommodate. He flabbergasted his parents three weeks ago, by willingly taking chewable antibiotics to treat an ear infection. I ran with that precedent, and bought him some chewable vitamins to see if he'd take those, too. He did! Six years of grinding NuThera vitamin pills into his rice milk, all done!

Unfortunately his food cravings -- we think it's more of a stim -- are at an all time high, and so is his weight. His pediatrician is not yet worried that he weighs 91 lbs, but Seymour and I are. More exercise for everyone, more activities to keep him away from the kitchen. Not easy as the kitchen/counter/peninsula area is our house's socializing nexus, but we'll make efforts to congregate elsewhere. Otherwise Leo thinks he gets food whenever he sees people gathered in the area.

We had Leo's annual social worker visit last week. My son did not hit her. That is a win! She did not cut our respite hours despite how well he's doing compared to last year, as Leo is still very obviously a 1:1 boy.

He is mostly cheerful and snuggly, grabbing us for spontaneous hugs and kisses, with huge lit-up smiles and giggles. He loves for us to lie down with him in the morning before he gets out of bed, and just hug. I'm normally a rather tactile-averse person, but cannot resist Leo's ever-so-sincere requests to "Lie down wif Mommy!" I'm savoring these moments, too -- I know two boys with autism who hit puberty a lot earlier than their peers, so who knows for how much longer early morning snuggling will be appropriate.

He had his first-ever full dental exam two days ago. They had no choice but to knock him out cold, and pull his loose front tooth as it was a liability for the anesthesiologist. (The awesome part: she handed me his tooth to keep, another first. He's swallowed or ignored/lost every other baby tooth.) His dentist couldn't believe what good teeth he has -- no cavities! Apparently the saying about "an apple a day" extends to dentists. He had a hard time coming out of the anesthesia, with prolonged emergence delirium, but eventually we got him into the car and took him home. Then he had a hard time remembering that he temporarily lacked sufficient balance to run rings on his beloved tactile path. By late afternoon he was just fine.

 

Yesterday we took him on our annual pumpkineering excursion to Bob's Pumpkin Patch in Half Moon Bay. He so loves running around with all the other kids, between the pumpkins, over the dead truck, through the cornstalks, around the goat pens, and up the hay bale pyramid. He enjoys his yearly trip to Bob's more than any other part of Halloween. And because he loves it so much, I feel the same way. Not that this will stop me from mooching candy off of his sisters on November 1st. (BTW, yesterday's BlogHer post is all about how to do Halloween -- or not -- when your kid has special needs.)

Even among all this happiness and goodness, I know that winter's coming. Leo's never had a good winter. The fact that Leo's never had a good winter is why he's still at the all-quirky-kids school rather than in a special ed class on a regular campus. But today, he is good and we are good and hope you're good, too.