Eating issues (contributed by Rhonda DeBough-Insook)

If you are challenged by eating issues at your home either by choice or for medical reasons, you may want to check out some of the new books in the Family Lending Library at the ECIR office - home of the service coordinators. Here is a list of the books that relate to kids with fussy eating habits:

Child of Mine: Feeding with Love and Good Sense (Ellyn Satter) offers a practical and common sense approach to good eating habits in children.

The Down Syndrome Nutrition Handbook: A Guide to Promoting Healthy Lifestyles (Joan Guthrie Medlen) covers all aspects of nutrition and healthy living for children with Down syndrome, from birth through young adulthood.

Feed Me, I’m Yours (Vicki Lansky) is the classic cookbook for parents of young kids. Includes a chapter on making your own baby food.

First Meals: Fast, Healthy, and Fun Foods to Tempt Infants and Toddlers (Annabel Karmel) is a gorgeous book filled with easy-to-make recipes, lots of colored photographs, and information on food-related health issues.

How to Get Your Kid to Eat...But Not Too Much: From Birth to Adolescence (Ellyn Satter) offers advice on avoiding mealtime battles. Includes a chapter on what “normal eating” means.

Just Take a Bite: Easy, Effective Answers to Food Aversions and Eating Challenges (Lori Ernsperger and Tania Stegen-Hanson) looks at different food aversions (i.e. textures, novel foods, reflux) and offers useful techniques to parents in an easy-to-read format.

If your child has diet restrictions these books may be helpful:

Feast Without Yeast: A Complete Guide to Implementing Yeast Free, Wheat (Gluten) Free and Milk (Casein) Free Living (Bruce Semon and Lori Kornblum) offers over 200 recipes. The authors are married and parents of a child with autism and food sensitivities.

Incredible Edible Gluten-Free Food for Kids: 150 Family-Tested Recipes (Sheri Sanderson). In addition to the kid-tested recipes this book also teaches parents to read food labels for hidden ingredients.

Wheat Free, Gluten Free Cookbook for Kids and Busy Adults (Connie Sarros) has 180 recipes that run the gamut from simple treats to hearty meals. Includes recipes for dishes kids can prepare for themselves.

Other food resources in our community

Mississippi Market (corner of Selby and Dale in St. Paul) has staff people who are knowledgeable about food and specific diets. The store carries a wide variety of food for restricted diets.

Fresh and Natural Foods (Highway 96 and Lexington Ave. in Shoreview) has natural and organic foods, offers educational classes, and has staff knowledgeable in food and wellness products.

BitterSweet Bakery (2105 Cliff Road in Eagan) specializes in gluten-free baked goods - cakes, cookies, breads, pancake and waffle mix.

Therapeutic Play Ideas

My son, and then my daughter, were both diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder. Both children benefited from heavy sensory input in order to keep them calm and keep them from jumping on the furniture, off the top step of the stairs to the landing below, etc. Our OT made a number of suggestions for home modifications which we used to turn a portion of our basement into a therapy play area. This has saved much wear and tear on the furniture, and has given the children a safe place to play and meet those sensory needs.

One wonderful thing added to our sensory room was a hammock swing (just an ordinary hammock with both ends tied together). Our OT helped us locate a "rotational device" from an adaptive equipment supplier; this allowed the hammock to spin, as well as swing back and forth. We put a mattress against the wall, and it allowed for "crashing" sensory input. Not only did our kids love it, but so did the other neighborhood kids who came over to play on it.

Need a soft landing surface for your playroom? We used a large alphabet puzzle mat made of interlocking foam tiles. You can find them at many toy stores like Toys R Us, Zany Brainy, etc. We connected them together, and not only did it make a great play surface, but our son learned the letters of the alphabet that way, since we would have him find letters, jump on letters, etc.

When my son started private OT therapy, we found he loved the giant pillows around the therapy room that he could jump on as part of his sensory activities. We wanted to add something like this to a sensory area for him, so our OT suggested an upholstery shop that sold huge bags of foam scraps very cheap. We bought large fabric remnants from a fabric store, stitched them together, and filled them with foam chunks to make giant pillows. They made a great addition to our sensory room. When our son grew older and was no longer interested in them, we passed the pillows on to a parent with a younger child with autism, who is now using them with the same joy.

Our daughter has a lot of sensory needs, and loves to crawl through tight spaces and have "squishes" in private OT therapy. One thing that she loved at the clinic was a tunnel she could crawl into, and we found one in a toy store. It had a cheap plastic cover, so our OT suggested that we remove it and cover the tunnel with fabric. It's easy to fold up and put away when we don't need it. Our daughter loves to crawl through it and even sits inside it to look at books or watch TV. It was worth the effort to recover it and make a cozy place for her to meet her sensory needs.

Toys and Play Ideas

Our daughter is a very visual learner. When she was two, she loved to have us read picture books to her but by age three, it was becoming more difficult to hold her attention long enough to read to her. We found using books with audio tapes for her to listen to at naptime and bedtime to be a way to help expose her to more books. You can find them in your local toy store, and another place we found was through Scholastic Books (those little book order forms that started coming home when my son started kindergarten.) These are also great for long car trips!

Video versions of picture book favorites have been a wonderful way to get our son interested in books. There are a lot of great videos out there now, and for the very "visual" child, this is a great way to turn them onto reading. Our son also enjoys having the closed caption feature turned on when watching videos or TV shows with that available as he is just starting to pick out words, then look at them in books.

My son has autism, and enjoys watching videos over and over again. When he was a preschooler, I decided that since he wanted to do that, maybe I could help him learn something at the same time rather than just memorizing the whole script of a movie. Someone suggested the Richard Scarry video series to us. Although they drove me crazy after a while, hearing them over and over, our son did learn the alphabet and numbers in a fun way for him.