Wednesday 24 April 2013

Introducing "Mr Bread"

This is a picture of my son's sandwich for his packed lunch this morning.  It's created using a toast stamp, which I press into the sandwich on both sides and then cut out. Don't worry, he eats the crusts too, he just likes the smiley face to be separate from the plebian crusts.

In T's autistic world, the things he loves most are honoured with names.  Therefore, every sandwich made with this smiling stamp toast bears the monicker "Mr Bread".  In between making "Mr Bread", I mix it up a bit  with a star, upper class triangles and proley old squares.  None of the other shapes are quite so good as Mr Bread and do not deserve names.

One of the ways T's autism manifests is by being extremely sensitive to noise, lights, touch, smell and taste.  This makes getting him to eat a varied range of foods impossible; whilst he breast fed tolerably well and weaned with great success onto a textbook range of foods, from about 12 months he started to refuse almost all the food he had previously eaten.  It goes beyond fussy eating into the realms of hunger strike: if he didn't know it, or it smelled wrong, or it felt wrong in his mouth, he would rather starve all day than eat. This is still true today and we have learned that he simply cannot bear the "wrong" food. Temperature is also an issue (food can be too warm or too cold), as is texture.  Do not, I repeat, do not try to get T to eat anything "slimy", wobbly or runny.

There is not the time today to list the foods he will not eat, or what he sometimes eats when the mood overcomes him, or what he eats constantly then goes off suddenly and without warning.  Needless to say, he eats a small range of food regularly and the rest is left to me to divine through the ether.

We don't sweat it.  One thing I've learned is that the easiest way to stop him eating is to insist that he does.  He takes supplements and occasionally tries something new, just to check if we're still keeping the case file open.  Trying does not mean adopting, another thing we have learned.  But trying is good, so we celebrate with flags and small dances when he at least tries something.

In reception, T ate honey sandwiches every day for a year.  We tried school dinners, naively hoping that peer pressure would encourage "proper eating" but that was before we fully understood the sensory overload he has to deal with at mealtimes.  In Year 1, he changed to jam sandwiches for one semester and then swapped to chocolate spread.
There was a brief flirtation with beef spread and tuna spread but he realised this was setting a dangerous precedent, so that was quickly put to bed before we got too excited.

This year, Year 2, chocolate is still king.  I slip in pork pies, sausage rolls and scotch eggs, to keep things savoury and encourage a bit of protein into his system, but sandwiches are strictly chocolate.  It looks like Mr Bread, the chocolate smiley face, will be with us for a little bit longer.


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