You may have already heard of this, but when your kid has significant feeding and sensory issues, one rule for introducing a new food is to try it 10 days consecutively, typically once a day. They will probably fight and gag and carry on at first, but if you picked a reasonable food to try, the idea is that after 10 days they will start to tolerate it - even if grudgingly - being part of their routine.
So now on Day 15 of the Great Diced Peaches Experiment, we have gone from “everybody was kung-fu fighting the peaches” to “if you’re lucky, this little peach thing will get in my mouth and then I’ll be yanking it back out and pitching it or just gagging and making a Shakespearean tragedy of it and spitting it out.” And here we were so hopeful since he used to love pureed peaches. Aren’t we cute for being hopeful? (rhetorical question)
We’ve been letting them do this at school because, as you may have come to know with your own kids, these little stubborn people who live in our house will often let others in therapy and school do things to them that they won’t let us do at home. Go figure. We thought they’d have more luck than we do at home. They have to an extent, but it’s hard to consider the Peaches Debacle much of a leap for feeding-kind.
This is getting really depressing. J-Man’s diet is already limited enough, and we’ve been stuck on the same foods for what feels like forever. He’ll eat a gallon of applesauce a day but would rather die than eat a diced peach. Go figure.
There is a sort of feeding spectrum to note here if you haven’t read previous episodes of our eating travails. He’ll eat runnier things (applesauce and puree jar food) and crunchy things (veggie straws, tortilla chips, fritos, saltines, toast) but almost nothing in that vast expanse in between that includes 99% of edible things. The only exceptions in the food consistency spectrum have been chicken nuggets and french fries. He once ate cheese fries at Chili’s and we nearly dropped dead at the wonderment of it. Well, it’s good to have fond memories.
I guess it could be worse. He is growing fine and has checked out as overall very healthy. It’s just that he’s bound to be missing out on certain nutrients even with the multivitamins and whatnot.
Well, what do you do. I guess we’ll punt peaches for now and try diced pears or something.
{ 5 comments… read them below or add one }
Cheese fries? Now THAT’S my nephew! Put some crumbled bacon and BBQ sauce on top for him….
He’s going to love enchiladas…..
Absent that, if the peaches were mashed up or pureed or what not, like the texture of applesauce, do you think he’d go for it?
We too have been told about the 10 times thing… and have found that 10 isn’t the magic number for acceptance- at least for our son.
I love your description of J-Man’s reaction. Good luck with the peaches!
@JB - actually, the cheese fries DID have some bacon on them. I still can’t really think about barbeque sauce though…
@Blake - yeah, I don’t think peaches are going to be his thing. He tolerated them as puree, but didn’t love them like he did the applesauce. Maybe we’ll try something not wet and slimy for a while…
I am a long time lurker on your blog (you guys are fab btw
) but reading J-man’s list of favoured foods sounded kind of familiar to me and pulled me out of lurkdom.
My ds1 is 4 1/2 and probably on the spectrum depending on which professional you talk to (and we have been talking to plenty of them recently! lol!) While he does eat a pretty wide variety of foods, we have noticed that he has a definite preference for anything strongly flavoured (but not too spicy) or strongly textured. Hence salt and vinegar crisps are his idea of manna! lol! He also likes runny, easy to eat stuff and anything really cold. Foods that have made their way onto the accepted and enjoyed list that have some semblance of nutrition include apples (have to be cold and crunchy and a little tangy), grapes (again cold and crunchy ones), frozen yoghurts, porridge (with syrup and only in the blue bowl with the blue spoon), crunchy breakfast cereal (currently cheerios and mini weetabix with chocolate) with NO milk (makes me shudder but he loves it), ham sandwiches with sauce for dipping (used to be salad cream but he has switched to tomato sauce recently), lettuce (crunchy iceburg type stuff), raw carrots, most mexican food as long as it isn’t too spicy (nachos, fajitas, enchiladas…), garlic bread, broccoli (I have no clue why but my kids all adore broccoli), baby bel cheeses and corn on the cob.
No idea if anything there is even vaguely helpful to you but I thought it might spark some thoughts about different things you might want to try with J-man as the peaches don’t seem to be hitting the spot. Plus it was just interesting to me to consider the sensory stuff behind ds’s food preferences.
Hi Bee! Welcome to non-lurkerdom, and thanks for the compliments!
Funny you should mention the strongly-flavored foods. Back in the day, J-Man used to sneak things like those habanero Doritos that would about rot my mouth out, but he would eat them without blinking. Of course, he would be up half the night with a tummy ache, which was why we had to hide all that stuff. But he did obviously like the taste.
We also used to dump lemon juice in green vegetable purees to get him to eat them. And before he’d actually put stuff in his own mouth, he would lick the salt off of everything and then hand it back to you without actually eating it. Mary would be an addict of salt and vinegar chips if we kept them in the house much. I personally find them repulsive, but Mary likes her the salt too. Clearly she and J-Man are related!
So obviously he likes the strong sensory stuff; you just have to get him to actually put it in his mouth and eat it. It’s just hard to get past his outer defenses, and that seems to be getting harder.
We gave up for a while introducing new foods because it was so stressful and we were trying to concentrate on other areas like speech and social interaction. You can only tackle so many things at once. But we’re now in diet improvement mode again and are taking suggestions from everyone.
As we said, the peaches were a disaster, but admittedly they are kinda slimy - his absolute least favorite texture. So we switched to hamburger (crumbled up, no buns or added flavorings) and he actually is starting to eat a few bites. Yay!
I think he would go back and start eating apple slices again, but he eats about a gallon of applesauce a day it seems so we’d like to find at least some other fruit he’ll eat. So far, no luck. If our current experiment with hamburger proves successful, we may try yogurt next. That should be a real adventure, but it would be nice to get all the good things yogurt has into his body to balance out his diet a little.
Right now he only drinks somewhat-sweetened iced tea, which I know is a capital offense across the pond, but they don’t call it “the house wine of the South” for nothing here. I would like to get him to drinking milk - heck I’d settle for water - so that’s probably going to be soon on our experiment list.
We offer him our table food most meals, but he rarely even touches it. He touched the garlic bread last night, but clearly the greasiness of the top of the bread was not something he cared for so he wiped his hands repeatedly and walked away.
We appreciate hearing everyone’s eating trials, tribulations, and successes. We’ve been struggling with this since he was nine months old, and it’s been slow, slow going. It’s been very helpful hearing what others have tried, and comparing notes has given us new ideas.
Thanks for your comment. Now that you’re no longer a lurker, comment some more! We’d love to hear from you.