Recently, Emmett has been struggling a great deal more with eating.
If you've followed our story for awhile, you might recall that we have an enormous challenge when it comes to Emmett and eating. He's extremely sensory oriented and struggles with things like food, clothes, noise and shitload of anxiety. The anxiety serves to make everything worse.
Anyway, Emmett has a very small menu of foods he'll eat, and that makes it challenging to feed him.
He's very sensitive to things like taste, smell, color, shape, packaging, presentation and imperfections. It's not uncommon for me to have to remake something a few times because something about it wasn't right.
Recently, Emmett has begun saying things like, *this doesn't taste right. *The problem is, what doesn't taste right, happens to be one of the few things he's historically eaten.
Yesterday alone, we discovered that he would no longer eat hamburgers. We always buy the same brand and cook them the same way, however, yesterday he discovered that they no longer *taste right. *He won't eat them anymore.
We cooked pasta for dinner last night. The pasta was perfectly cooked, and he eats it with butter and salt. This time, however, *it didn't taste right. *He won't eat it anymore.
Kids with Autism often *generalize *things in life. If something tastes bad this time, it's always going to taste bad. This is the way Emmett is wired, and we've had very limited luck in regards to helping him work through these types of problems.
Tonight we had a massive meltdown because Emmett was hungry, but nothing tasted right, and despite our exhaustive efforts, he would eat very little.
Having Emmett no longer eat something isn't unheard of. What's different about this is that *everything tastes funny. *
My current theory has to do with this being a new symptom of his fever disorder. We're pretty sure that he began a flare a few days ago. We also know that his SED rate is almost twice what it should be, indicating something is wrong.
To make matters even more difficult, our grocery budget has been slashed, and it was already inadequate for what we needed.
I'm not sure what's going on, but he was just at the doctors and has a clean bill of health. He's not stuffy or dealing with head or sinus congestion either. Sometimes that can impact the way things taste.
This is one of the things that's popped up recently, and I haven't had the energy to write about.
I'm unsure of how this is going to play out, or if this is a temporary problem. We've never experienced a situation where he no longer tolerates this many foods at one time, at least in regards to foods that he eats religiously.
I'm not going to lie. I'm concerned about this because I'm not sure what we're going to do...
