We’ve started “food therapy” for Acroboy. Basically I make the nearly two hour drive every week to meet with the ocupational therapist who works with food. We do a food practice to help Acroboy get over his food aversions.
What aversions you might say? Gagging on foods he doesn’t want to swallow, crying and melting down just even seeing certain foods. Limited diet that consists of pizza, pot stickers, Cinnamon Toast Crunch, pb&J sandwiches on bread (it has to be the Goober stuff grape flavor), only certain kinds of chicken nuggets,etc. Having issues with textures of foods or the way they are presented. He’ll eat scrambled eggs, and but not the yolk in a sunny side or hard boiled egg. He’d eat french fries, but not potato wedges.
His therapist was great. She gave me so many things to work on with him. It’s my responsibility to work with him at home to try new foods. We also don’t refer to thefoods by name, but by attribute. So we try the yellow lines (Pirate Booty), then yellow circles (bananas), then blue circles (blueberries). Initially we link foods by at least one common attribute.
Acroboy won’t touch a lot of the foods right now, but he thought today was fun enough he didn’t cry so much when we had green circles (Cucumber slices). He wanted them as far away as possible, and he whined a little, but he didn’t cry.
The therapist says it takes at least ten exposures of trying a food before you can really know if you like it or not. The goal for us and Acroboy is to keep exposing him to foods over and over and to slowly increase contact with those foods.
Let’s hope this works!