Feeding Ollie - INTRODUCTION

O.K., let me tell you what I don’t want to hear from any of you: “….my kids just eat whatever my husband & I are eating…and that’s that! No special meals for anyone!”

Fine. I am thrilled that this is working in some households but I can tell you that over the course of 20 years and 5 kids who are now between 10 and 20, I have walked a few miles in my own shoes from the kitchen to the dining room and I have no interest in sharing my husband’s or my food with those kids at this time, just to toss it into the garbage 30 minutes later.

When I had the luxury of time with my first child, I labored over a food mill, turning carrots and rutabagas into magic baby veggie-potions, I baked brown barley bread, I made organic Greek Yogurt…all for that perfect baby. He ate whatever I made, smiling sweetly at me. It spelled h-a-p-p-i-n-e-s-s. I was a GOOD MOTHER, accomplished, a woman with a purpose in the kitchen.

Then I had those other kids and Ollie is my fifth, the baby of the family. He is now 10. He pretty much only eats chocolate.

We need help…but not the scolding kind. We need a FOOD MIRACLE.

Ollie has food aversions. He is my worst eater right now. He is bone thin and pale, but enthusiastic about life in spite of the fact that he was diagnosed with Asperger’s, OCD and dyslexia when he turned 8. That’s when his food quirks started making sense to us and mostly because of our 2^nd child, now 17, our severely autistic son who completely greased the skids for us regarding food aversions as they relate to the autism spectrum by eating only a very few specific foods for years and who had never had a vegetable until he started liking tomoto soup at the age of 14 (he has tomato soup pretty much every night now). For the first 7 years of this life or so, he lived on starbursts and Pizza. Gluten free diet trends were just starting to pop up as a link to recovery for autism and although I believe that this certainly worked for some kids (and I happen to be gluten/wheat free myself) this would have been torture for my kids and way too expensive to pull off over the years…which is not to say that I don’t still flirt with the notion of turning it all around some day by slaying the wheat demons that lurk among us...although I also know that there are simply kids who are more severely autistic than others - this is obvious - and not all kids will respond in the same way to anything. I presented my autistic son, so long ago, with bricks of dry, tasteless bread and he simply did not get it; try to explain the advantages of a gluten free regimen to an easily agitated non-verbal child…not my idea of a party, especially when that brick costs $5.99 and it molds before anyone takes more than one bite. I know that gluten free products have evolved tremendously since those early rock hard imposter-loaves but at this point my kids have all tasted the very broad world of main-stream American treats and I might have to chain them down to completely change how we go about it now; it would have been almost do-able with one or two kids but 5 makes it more complex. Over the years, we got REALLY BUSY and had to PICK OUR BATTLES and those battles were not all going to be about the clean plate club or the food pyramid. Half the time we were simply trying to STABILIZE or SANITIZE those kids and that felt like GOOD-ENOUGH parenting. The irony though, and what keeps this at the top of my "CONFLICTS TO KEEP WORKING ON" list, is that I am one of the healthiest eaters on the planet; I am a strict vegetarian who eats abundant fresh veggies, berries, tofu...I brew my Kombucha...etc.

So there you have it and now for the purpose of the Ollie blog…I have invited Ollie to be a food critic…as long as he is living his life as the world’s pickiest eater, I have decided to embrace it and see where that takes us. My goal, ultimately: TRICK HIM INTO EATING HEALTHFULLY, but as a Mom who has disguised whole grain, Organic Toaster Pastries inside the “REAL” Pop-Tart boxes and been busted before he would even try one bite - even though it was frosted and "matched" his beloved Kellogs version - I am just a tad weary from my efforts.

Above is an image of many of the "staples" in Ollie’s diet. When the rest of the family has a Thanksgiving feast including vegetarian AND real-meat versions of the Turkey, Ollie looks forward to his own tradition of Chocolate Lucky Charms…for him it wouldn’t be Thanksgiving without it!

Stay tuned as Ollie taste-tests, compares and critiques what the planet has to offer and let’s see if we can get him to fall in love with (or just tolerate a nibble of) something that’s GOOD FOR HIM : ) 

Also see:http://topattytoruby.blogspot.com