Our babysitter can't handle Jake.

So we found out this weekend that our babysitter can no longer handle Jake. This was the person we were planning to have take care of Jake for a couple days when the baby is born.

She could handle him when he was one, but she doesn't seem to be able to handle his terrible twos phase.

We dropped him off at her house over the weekend and when we came back 7 hours later, he hadn't eaten or drank anything. He has been balling his eyes out. He had been inconsolable.

What happened? Why didn't he get fed? She said, "I didn't want to upset him anymore." Apparently he went on a hunger strike and she didn't push him.

Well Jake needs to be pushed. A lot. Sometimes downright forced. We often need to "help" him eat by holding him still and putting the food in his mouth for him.

We don't expect our babysitters to do that, but we do expect an attempt. How can we drop him off at her house for 2 days? He needs food and drink, and we don't want her hooking him up to the feeding pump.

Grrr. So frustrating...

My experience with Chinese food.

We ordered Chinese the other night and I thought I'd write about my experience. I haven't had Chinese food in ages. It reminds me of when I was a kid - our family would often go for Chinese food.

When we ordered they guy spoke broken English and he got part of our order wrong. Oh well. That's par for the course. It's expected.

Guess what? Chinese food tastes the same as when I was a kid. There has been no progress in Chinese food over the last 20 years. It's kind of like the Big Mac. The same wherever you go.

We got a lot of food for $30. 5 meals worth to be exact. I wonder how they stay in business? Food is expensive in BC. Where do they buy their food so that they can feed you 5 meals for $30?

The old joke with Chinese food is that you can stuff yourself and 30 minutes later you'll be hungry. I stuffed myself and it actually took 62 minutes before I felt hungry again.

They sent us 3 fortune cookies with forgettable positive fortunes. Jake was distrustful of his cookie and wouldn't try it, even though we told him it was a cookie. He enjoyed watching us break our cookies open, however.

We ordered 4 or 5 courses, but they all kind of blended together on my plate so that I didn't really know what I was eating by the end. So even the different dishes of Chinese food taste about the same.

We ended up throwing out a lot of it after the second day and 5th meal. By that point it no longer looked appetizing, and our palates were sick of it.

That is my 2010 Chinese food experience.

Tough day for the little guy.

The little man had a hard day yesterday. Not hard like heart-surgery hard, but tough enough for a two year old.

First, he began getting sick. By the night he was crying and coughing and throwing up and dry heaving. Cindy had to sleep with him in the den because he was too upset to be alone.

At lunch he had no appetite but we didn't yet know that he was sick. It just so happened that today the behaviour analyst came by and when he was resisting, she wanted to play hardball by not offering rewards unless he swallowed. The poor guy lost it and started crying and hitting his head.

It was easily the worst meal in the last 6 months. A huge setback.

Last week was his first healthy week since December. We kept him home from daycare for two weeks until he recovered. Now he's sick again.

Poor guy.

A useless book about how to get your child to eat.

I'm skimming Just two more bites! : helping picky eaters say yes to food by Linda D. Piette and have quickly determined that the book is useless for us.

First, it's written by a pediatric nutritionist. Right there is a warning flag. Nutritionists don't know how to get kids to do things. Behaviourists do.

Second, the book is filled with tons of dull common sense advice - the kind of advice the community medical people told us. "Try a new sippy cup." "Keep meals short." "Don't get into a battle over food."

Third, on page 81 she says, "Don't use food to bribe or reward or punish." While technically correct, we were told that Jake needs his positive behaviour reinforced.

At the beginning she writes, "The trick is to act like you don't care if your kid eats or not."

For Jake, that didn't work either. He started eating when we applauded him and acted like we cared.

The rest of the book goes into boring boring detail about recipes and multi-vitamins and different types of personalities. Very little practical information here.

Unfortunately, there are lots of books like this out there. Jake needs to be pushed, encouraged and basically forced to eat. Books by medical professionals that basically tell you not to push your kid are simply not effective for us.

Jake gained 13 ounces in 16 days.

Not sure if that's good, but it sounds good to us. His eating has been outstanding lately, and his speed is slowly increasing. Worst meal is breakfast, but he still eats way way more than he did in the summer.

Drinking is still a challenge. It takes two of us to encourage him to drink his sippy cup. We have to put it in his mouth for him. If we give him the cup he throws it across the room. Grrr. It's frustrating.

Just the last couple nights he's been taking his sippy cup from the fridge and walking around with it, occasionally drinking. I've noticed the kids at daycare do that. This is a good sign.

Now that he's mostly off formula, we've started giving him Flintstone vitamins. They're the same from when I was a kid! The taste and smell of the vitamins brings one of those flash-back memories from when you young. I used to like the car vitamin best. I'd bite off the heads of the characters.

Jake isn't sure what to think of the vitamins. He doesn't like biting them yet because they're too hard and he's used to softer food.

The master manipulator.

I'm grudgingly impressed with the way Jake can manipulate people (including us). He's a master at avoiding at eating and he's developed some sneaky tricks to use on us and the daycare workers.

Here's a few of the things he does:

Fake tired.
He pretends he's exhausted and tired. He signs sleep and lies his head down on the tray. He slouches forward as well and pretends he's sleepy. This really tricked us at first. We'd get him down and then he's immediately start playing with tons of energy. Now we say, "Sit up straight" and pull his head and body to a sitting position.

Turning his head to Look Somewhere
He'll pretend to be interested in the kitchen behind him and he'll turn his head to watch something, just as we prepare to feed him. So we've turned his chair around so he's facing the kitchen. Now when he spins around, there's only a wall.

Holding Food in His Mouth
He will hold food in his mouth and stop chewing.

Fake Sips
By far his most clever trick. When we first started behavioural therapy he'd drink properly and gulp his milk. He'd drink 100 ml a meal. Now he's back to 5 ml to 50 ml if we're lucky. He figured out that he can simply hold the cup in his mouth, and it looks like he's drinking the milk. He does a fake little swallow, but just swallows his saliva.

The trick is telling tell his daycare worker to be forceful. They don't like forcing kids to eat. We say, "If it was up to him, he'd starve." The trick is also to keep up with his avoidance. As he figures out our strategies, he's able to counter them.

Subway is disappointing.

You know what? Subway is disappointing. I've been disappointed the last few times I've gone there. It's not a horrible restaurant. It's just not very good.

Which is too bad because they have so much potential. It's clean, relatively healthy. The service is good and the prices are reasonable. It's just that the sandwiches fall short. I think the vegetables are a little wilted. Their bread all tastes the same.

And the six inch size is just a little too small. While the 12 inch size is too big.

I like Quizno's better. Better presentation (a little basket), you get a hot pepper, they invented toasting the bun and they have better sizes (8 inch). On the downside: expensive.

But back to Subway: we had it last night and the bread was a little stale. The sandwiches are also a little bland. Poor Jared had to eat there for years. I would have puked every day, and that's how I would have lost my weight.

Bribing your child.

In the two years that we've tried to encourage Jake to eat, we've never had one doctor, community support worker, occupational therapist, physiotherapist, speech therapist or specialist suggest bribing our child.


All the books and articles I've read about getting your child to eat say, "Don't force your child; it's up to them and they'll eat when they want to."


I was telling this to our behaviour therapist yesterday and she sort of winced and said that all books and workers believe in a "child-centric" approach, which doesn't work. Especially for kids like Jake.


She said that all the behavioural academic literature says the exact opposite - you should "bribe" your children to eat and then phase out the bribe. She did say, "We don't call it 'bribing'. We call it reinforcement."


So why is there such a difference between the people in the field and the people doing the research? No idea. I can only think that as parents we've been brainwashed to think that reinforcement is bad. For some reason, the community workers think the same thing - or agree with general cultural wisdom that says you shouldn't manipulate your kids.



The funny thing is they don't get results. Whenever we asked for help with Jake they said, "We'll get you in touch with other parents whose kids are on a gtube."



No! I don't want a support group. I want advice that works. I don't want to talk to parents with the same problem. I want to talk to parents who fixed the same problem.

Jake only eats ice cream.

If your child ate only ice cream would you let your child eat ice cream? Or would you ban your child from eating ice cream and have the doctor install a gastric tube into his stomach so that you could pump formula into your child's stomach?

I've asked this question to people and don't get a straight answer. The question is just too hard. People don't want their child only eating ice cream and they don't want their child fed with a g-tube. So I get lots of advice about how to get Jake to eat, but not an answer to the question.

Jake's in an "ice cream only" phase. He'll sit down and take a few bites of food and then sign "ice cream". If we don't give him ice cream, he cries and stops eating and drinking. We need to g-tube feed him.

With an average kid we'd just say, "Oh well you don't get to eat today." But Jake is very underweight and needs as many calories as possible. Not pumping him with milk would mean no energy for his next meal. That would mean no eating or drinking, indefinitely.

In other words Jake can go on a hunger strike to get what he wants. And we pretty much have to give in because he could do real damage to himself and his body. We've tried twice to starve him. Both times we had to end the experiment because he went 2 to 3 days without eating or drinking.

He doesn't care if he's starving or dehydrated. He hasn't properly learned to eat and associate food with satiation. And the doctors we've seen just don't have the expertise in this area.

So we hired a behaviourist who has had some success getting kids with autism to eat. Let's see how she does with Jake and his parents.

McDonald's gives free samples.

I went to McDonald's for lunch yesterday and saw a girl walking around with free samples. Well, not really walking around. Mostly all the poor, grubby customers were coming to her. I think she had a tray of bite-sized hamburger cut in wedges.

She was just sort of standing there with a dazed look on her face.

This McDonald's was beautiful. It had fire places and couches and bar stools and inset televisions. It had a patio with heat lamps and a giant fireplace.

What has happened to McDonald's? What happened to the bright orange walls and the sticky, plastic booths, and the overflowing garbages, and the freaking garish paintings of Hamblurger.

That's the thing with McDonald's now. It's trying so hard to be an upscale place, but they've neglected to change the little things. They have leather couches, but you sill walk around carrying a plastic tray.

They have fireplaces and jazzy music, and you still stand in line with fellow slobs, while a bunch of teenagers yell at each other behind the counter.

Very strange. You think you're at the Keg or Starbucks for a second, then you glimpse a long cheeseburger streak along the polished marble floor.