Today was one of those days where you think that the hours will simply slide into each other, easily, quietly, without major merit, or major event. Tonight’s dinner for example, it was nothing spectacular, just a simple meal of breaded shrimp, fish sticks, mashed potatoes and corn. Typically, N would only have eaten the fish sticks, and after putting a small amount of the other 3 items on his plate we would have finished making him some cheesy noodles to accompany it. But, and this is where the evening changed to special, he ATE the mashed potatoes! For a child with such a self-limited diet, this was huge! Last week was the first time he didn’t have a meltdown from seeing a food he didn’t want to eat on his plate. Prior to then he wouldn’t have eaten anything on his plate until the food he didn’t want was removed, and he would have been desolate until you removed it. But between the trips to the delicatessens, and farms we’ve been working steadily with him on accepting new foods, not even trying them, just accepting them on his plate. I thought it would take much longer for him to be willing to try one of the new foods on his plate. But tonight he said he didn’t want the mashed potatoes, so we told him “then don’t eat them” and left it at that. A few minutes later, he was cautiously dipping his fork into them, and actually trying them. He ate all of them on his plate and asked for more! It was wonderful, and certainly made this day special for me. It marks a definitive progress in expanding his diet. It shows that the methods I’ve utilized to help him, really are helping him. The feeling of accomplishment I get from that is huge. I look forward to watching his continued progress with meal times. I know he won’t try everything every single time, I know that it’ll take time, but I see that glimmer that what I’m doing is working, that I was in fact reading him and his signs correctly, and that my intuition on how to help him in this area was correct, and that makes this day awesome.
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Contributing Author at Parents Space
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Behind starburst eyes 
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