The other day, Ewan and I were out of town to see his Feeding Team specialists due to some new issues that have popped up with swallowing correctly. The appointment lasted awhile and Ewan was very patient throughout the whole thing so when we were done I thought he and I both needed a snack break. We decided to stop at a Starbucks since mommy was running low on energy and a cup of coffee always seems to help!
The great thing about Starbucks for the family with a guy who eats like Ewan does, is that all the food they offer is highly flavored and often with lots of spices. So for the guy who loves cinnamon and nutmeg, this is certainly the place to get a snack. Ewan hasn’t moved to that wonderful stage of multiple textures that a lot of combined foods offer such as apple pie, or chicken and pasta, we’re still working on a lot of the single foods. So when it comes time to order, I chose pumpkin bread and Ewan said, ‘me too!’ and I thought it might be worth a shot because of all the talk we had been doing about fall, Halloween, and Pumpkins. The absolutely wonderful thing was that after Ewan smashed his pumpkin bread, played with a little, and basically inspected every inch of it, he ATE it and he LIKED it. Wow!!!
My house is transformed in the fall and I decorate everything with leaves and pumpkins—both real and pretend, squishy decorations for the kids to play around with, and plenty of fall related books. I even go so far as to find a scent we know Ewan likes such as cinnamon and buy the super scented candles and candle warmers so our place has that fall smell to it. We want Ewan to experience fall from a visual and olfactory perspective, and to understand the process behind fall, something as simple as change. And as most of us know, change for the child on the spectrum is a difficult thing. But we also talk about leaves, foods that are ripe in the fall like apples and pumpkins, and we talk about Halloween a lot. We have a giant board in our hallway where we put up real photos and symbols, and drawings of whatever we’re targeting so right now we have a mix of fall foods, different types of leaves, and trips to pumpkin patches that we’ve been to. All of these things help reinforce what Ewan is learning and experiencing at home, at therapy, out and about, or at preschool.
One of the books that we have been reading almost every night is The Runaway Pumpkin by Kevin Lewis. Kevin, if you ever read this, THANK YOU for writing this book! It’s a great book for all kids but it’s especially wonderful for those who need a little extra ‘umph’ in the feeding department and even the speech department (this is a fun book to use with AAC devices and strategies). The wonderful thing about this story is that each of the characters thinks of a different recipe that could be made with this wildly huge pumpkin barreling down the hill. One of the foods mentioned is pumpkin bread so when I ordered my pumpkin bread at Starbucks, Ewan said something about ‘Baxters’ but at the moment we were standing there, it didn’t sink in what he was talking about.
A lot of the times when Ewan speaks, he leaves out important pieces of information so there’s often a point of reference that is missing and you may get a name or part of the story but not the whole thing. So that means, I’ve really got to be observant when I’m with him, following his gaze, remembering what he was excited about in the parking lot because later, even days or weeks later, he’ll be talking about these things and the frame of reference isn’t always there and I’ll have to fill in the blanks. So when he said ‘Baxters’ at Starbucks, I kind of forgot who the Baxters were until later that night as we read The Runaway Pumpkin again and when we got to the pumpkin bread part it all clicked for me and I knew what he meant. We got some more pumpkin bread for Ewan to eat at home and now when he asks for it, he’ll mention Poppa Baxter who also likes pumpkin bread and makes a connection that some (including mom!) might not get, might ignore, or might not be reinforced. So this weekend, we’ll be making our own pumpkin bread and talking about fall, pumpkins, the Baxters and The Runaway Pumpkin just to reinforce all the concepts and ideas of autumn, the harvest, eating fall foods, Halloween, and the next holiday—Thanksgiving.