Yes this is another post about attempting to feed my fae. It is a subject that occupies most of my waking hours, so deal with it!

Yesterday, I was elated by the first signs that my child may actually have a food preference that she would be prepared to eat. She turned from the television, which was at the time presenting the trials and tribulations of an anthropomorphic coral polyp, and announced she wanted Pirate Pie. Of course, she wants a food that is from an Octonauts cartoon and made from ingredients that don’t exist in the world we inhabit. According to the cartoon we need coral slime (very important), essence of peg leg, powdered parrot feather and a multitude of other improbable things.

Well, that’s not going to stop me: if she will eat it, I WILL find a way to make it! So, with the challenge accepted, I spent the day mulling over how to make something that doesn’t have any relation to real life. It was fortunate that, a few days before she made this announcement, my husband found on YouTube a recipe to make tofu from pumpkin seeds and this was something we had tried, since tofu is a soft, bland, homogeneous food we felt might make a good base to feed to her anyway. It turned out that, despite the promises of it being ‘delicious,’ it was in fact utterly tasteless and made us question if it was worth the effort of chewing. 

But it is also slightly slimy and a disturbing pale green colour. In short, when looking for a substitute for coral slime, it’s perfect! If you dump enough curry powder (powdered parrot feather) on it, it also becomes palatable, if slightly brown. So, now having figured out how I’m going to fake.. err.. ‘replicate’ the important ingredients, I added a few optional extras: sweet potato, onion, garlic and ginger (because pirates like to chop, chop, chop) and simmered the whole lot in vegetable stock (essence of peg leg). 

I cheated, and bought the puff pastry to make the top, complete with skull and cross bones. 

So, my fae and I spent the afternoon chopping, mixing, smashing and rolling and produced a pirate pie! Even better, when it came out of the oven she said it looked ‘yummy’.

2 minutes before we sat down to eat, the fae father cooked something that made the kitchen smell, and that was enough for her to decide that it must be the pie, it was therefore yucky and she was not going to even try it. She wanted porridge instead. Sometimes, you just want to break down and cry. 

She refused point blank to even try the bloody thing, she wouldn’t even say why. Under careful bartering, she (reluctantly) agreed to eat one mouthful on a poppadom, providing she got the porridge after.  

So, I go to make the sodding porridge. I place it on the table. She announces she doesn’t want the porridge, she’s going to finish the pie with poppadoms. 

I quit.

For those who don’t know it:

The pirate pie song

And if you’re interested Pumpkin tofu

So, courtesy of an overdose of Cocomelon, I think I may have stumbled on the Rosetta Stone of getting my fae to eat somewhere near her 5-a-day! You will need: 7 different coloured fruits, ice lolly molds, sieve, a blender, freezer and time. 

We’re going to make rainbow ice lollies. If your child is anything like mine these will have to be accurate, so make sure you know your spectrum! I have tried a fair few different fruits and many work but I have found that there are definite preferences. 

Red: Strawberries, depending on the season and whether these are store bought, you may need to sweeten these. Raspberries also work but you will need to strain out the seeds. 

Orange: Mango. Oranges also work (what a shock!) but again you will need to strain out the pulp. 

Yellow: Pineapple (strangely this makes my tongue numb go figure). I guess bananas also would work. 

Green: Grapes. Kiwi seems to also be a favorite but I found that the seeds can make the slurry bitter, also be aware that kiwis have a high incidence causing anaphylactic allergic response so take care when introducing them to your child. 

Blue. Honestly? I cheat and use banana and food colouring. There is a rumour that blueberries work but these always seem more purple then blue. 

Indigo: Black grapes. Also those blueberries will shine here, but there are a multitude of fruits that work here. 

Violet: black cherries. Blackberries, blueberries, plums there are a lot of things that work. 

Make sure you freeze each layer for at least 15 minutes before adding the next, and leave in the freezer overnight at the end. Mine always look like a bad acid trip rather than neat layers but that’s the price I pay for being impatient.

You can strain all the fruit but that will diminish the flavor and it will reduce the fibre content as well as some of the micronutrients. Despite the lack of added sugar there is a lot of natural sugar in fruit so you may want to limit the amount they have a day, but honestly for a child that was living off crisps and potato waffles, these are a massive improvement in her diet. I would love for her to eat a regular amount of fruit and vegetables instead of going through this performance but if going through it will get something sort-of-healthy in her, I will do it.

So our fae has … interesting eating habits. That is to say, if she eats, then she has interesting eating habits. She has habits similar to a snake, in the way that she exists.

She will eat her own body weight one week and then for the next month live off air and water. It’s most frustrating. If she is going through a growth spurt I can’t shovel enough into her to satiate her appetite. I may have mentioned my frustrations with her diet before once or twice (or every other post). But recently she has driven to new heights of frustration with her new habit of wanting only one type of food at a time.

So, from November to January she would only eat dahl and rice. She completely depleted our stores of the stuff. I then went through the agony of making three fresh batches because the first wasn’t the right texture, the second the wrong shade of beige, and the third was the last try at remaking the original. She wouldn’t even touch them. It was soul destroying. I just managed to make some she would try when she decided that what she actually needed to eat was potato waffles.

So February every meal was potato waffles. She initially wanted it served with a fried egg (that she would ignore) but she would only eat potato waffles. This month, it’s porridge. She has three or four bowls of it a day. 

It’s driving me insane, despite the reassurances of the dieticians and school that she is fine and obviously gaining enough nutrition from somewhere (I’m beginning to suspect she is some sort of coral and is relying on a plant symbiote to sustain her through photosynthesis). I take comfort that if you average out everything she has eaten since the beginning of the year, it IS a balanced diet.. she just does it in blocks of a few weeks rather than on a day by day basis. Better than nothing right?

When our fae was first diagnosed I was warned by many people that she would not like cuddles or being touched at all. I was told this by well meaning people full of sympathy. If I was able to raise a single eyebrow at that I would have, as it was I just smiled sardonically and nodded. My daughter has a lot in common with a python: She likes to grab onto you and Not. Let. Go. There have been times that I have been concerned about my ability to breathe when she has latched onto my neck. 

In fact, our daughter is not standoffish at all. We have the opposite problem. She is hyper-affectionate to everyone. She doles out hugs and kisses like they are going out of fashion, she high-fives everyone from the shopping trolley as we walk around the supermarket and will latch onto random parents (and grandparents) at soft play and encourage them to join in. Leading to often awkward conversations where we try to explain delicately that octogenarians generally are neither necessarily willing nor able to crawl through tunnels or dive into ball pits. 

She has also been known to dive bomb any available adult already in said ball pits, and on one notable occasion hugged an electrician as he arrived at our house. This was of great surprise to him and chagrin to us, as he was only coming back to fix the mess he made by flooding the kitchen the day before. None of this really worries her though. (For future reference if your electrician needs to know in a hurry where the stopcock is. it’s not a good sign!)

Her latest favorite targets are the teachers and LSAs at her school. She has used this to great advantage to ingratiate herself with all staff that work there. It turns out that the secret to success in school is to be non-verbal and hug a lot. Being small & blonde with big blue eyes probably helps, but mostly it’s not speaking and hugging. 

So where am I going with all this? Autism is a condition that was first studied and predominantly diagnosed in boys: this is a statement of fact. It turns out, it can present very differently in girls, also a statement of fact. It turns out that girls can, and often unknowingly will, ‘mask’ their symptoms better – probably fact, but I can’t find reliable sources to hand on this, just a lot of anecdotal evidence. So, just because your fae doesn’t “tick the boxes” for Autism (and especially if they’re a girl) it doesn’t mean they are not on the spectrum. It is a spectrum and it can present very differently in girls to boys. 

Finally, what I have noticed is that how my daughter’s autism affects her is changing with her age: she has recently become very sensitive to noise and school is now exhausting her in a way it never used to. She stims more, and needs more downtime. You need to be flexible with your approach as age can, and for us does, play a factor in her behavior.

We moved house (and county) last year. In the process we freed up some equity, which we resolve to use to “fae-proof” our new home. She doesn’t maliciously set out to damage things, she just.. “happens” to them. In our house, her name is now an adjective, used to explain when something has been inadvertently broken by her overenthusiasm. Unless items are exceptionally robust, they tend to fail her in-store testing. 

So, we needed to replace 3 bookcases, my desk, the couch, sideboard and table. As none of these replacement purchases were going to be inexpensive, we chose to invest in well-made furniture that might last, rather than cheaper pieces that would collapse in weeks. Most of what she broke was from a Swedish store that specializes in flatpacks. The table, however, was made of teak reclaimed from a Science lab: in its first incarnation it survived schools, fires, the occasional explosion and various chemicals. If you look closely you can still see the scars from its hard life. My father rescued it from an untimely death in the 70s and made it into a nice table, where it survived multiple moves, the childhood of both my brother and myself, and use as an engineering workbench in the garage. In fact, thinking about it now, I am astounded that in 3 short years our fae managed to “happen” to it in such a fashion to render it unsafe for use as a dining room table. Finding something liable to be more sturdy took some looking and a great deal of expense.

What we ended up with was basically a large slab of solid oak, supported by steel girders that look sufficient to hold up the house. It is complimented by two benches of similar construction: myself and my husband sit on one; our daughter spends meal times scooting, sliding and spinning around on the other, pausing occasionally for a mouthful of food. We also purchased a couple of chairs, on the off-chance we have visitors brave enough to endure a meal time with us. They don’t get used much.

Upon its arrival, we awaited our fae’s reaction: She’s not always happy with changes. As it was, however, she loved this table. She loved that you could eat on it, play with it, and make a blanket fort under it. She thought it was awesome. No, seriously, awesome – to the point where, for 6 months after its arrival, if you came within a 15m radius of the house, you were dragged into the dining room to admire it. Neighbors, friends, family, the postman (actually any delivery driver), the gas engineer and the man who was there to read the water meter – they were all irresistibly hauled in to stare in bemusement at this large lump of tree, whilst this strange fae creature blinked up at them in silent expectation of their reaction. They would become more and more awkward as they floundered for the response which would release them from this unexpected challenge, before turning beseeching looks on myself or my husband for the answer to this puzzle. 

Depending on who they were and how annoying they had been (in the case of the gas engineer who had taken an eternity to figure out how to fix the boiler) we would let them squirm from a bit. It was amusing. 

I was almost sad when she stopped. But at least there are no more strangers suddenly appearing in the house.

In the past week I have heard phrases from my 5 year old I thought I had at least another decade before we had to deal with. If I hear ‘it’s not fair’ one more time I can’t guarantee that I will respond in an adult fashion: There is a good chance I will break into song with “I think you’re really mean”

Childish? Yes? Inappropriate? Yes? Satisfying? SOOOOO yes.

At the moment I’m keeping my inner child in check with a steady diet of cola and the promise of punching virtual people later (side note: VR headsets are therapeutic as they offer a form of escapism that is unrivaled).

She has also discovered that her clothing has pockets, and has taken to slouching around the house hands in pockets, shoulders rounded, huffing like an asthmatic in a marathon when told to come to dinner or tidy her toys.

I oscillate between exasperation and amusement at her antics. I want to know how I sent a 5 year old to school and picked a 15 year old up later in the day. Anyone know?