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Spinach Tortellini

It has taken YEARS of effort (my family, and Friend and Doc, will back me up on this), but Tad has actually developed into a decent eater.  And I’m not talking about quantity (because HOLY CRAP, can he put away food), I’m talking about his willingness to eat a variety of foods.  Now, he may not like everything he tries, but we have become big proponents of the “one bite/one serving” rule.  Everything must be tried at least once.

With Tad eating better, Rerun has become more compliant about following the same rules.  We’ve also seen changes in his appetite, coupled with his medications.  But I can definitely say that Rerun is a better eater than he was a couple of years ago (even if he whines about it).

And then there’s Thumper, the eater of habit.

As far as we can tell, Thumper does not have any hangups with texture or taste.  He just refuses to eat anything that he hasn’t eaten before, and then he develops irrational preferences to only certain types of foods.  (Also, the broken food problem has not gone away.)  This means getting Thumper to eat a balanced diet is tricky.

Once we find a thing he will willingly feed himself (therapy has enabled him to join the “one bite” club, but it’s a fight), we tend to make that thing a part of our weekly menu.

I’m not sure when we discovered that Thumper liked the spinach tortellini from Trader Joe’s, but once we discovered that he would feed himself a giant bowl of it in a single sitting, it became an immediate winner.  Fortunately, the other boys like it, too – not as much as Thumper does, but they rarely complain about eating it.  And it HAS to be the fresh spinach tortellini from Trader Joe’s.  We found that out the hard way.

This is yet another example of how everything we thought we knew about autism when Tad was little, Thumper has thrown out the window and set it on fire.  If only we’d known at the time how much MORE complicated Thumper was going to be…

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