Adjusting

Over the past few weeks, Grace has made great strides in adjusting to the diet and accepting what the diet means for her. She understands that there are certain foods that she just can not have. A typical conversation goes something like this:
What are you eating?
Toast.
I like-a toast.
Yes, but you can't have it, right?
No toast for Gracie and Daddy - just Mommy and Rita
Right. Good girl!

Tom continues to do the Atkins diet so that Grace has a partner of sorts to help her with the diet. Grace identifies strongly that Daddy is also not eating the foods that she wants/likes. To some degree it does seem to help.

We started taking Grace back out to restaurants. We have found chicken wings to be a good eating out meal. Grace gets about 4 wings. We bring her heavy cream and oil or give it to her before we go. Before the diet, we ate out a lot and the kids really enjoyed it. It became a very social thing. I know that Gracie missed going out when the diet started but she could not handle seeing foods she loves go by and not want them. We found the nearby 'Wings To Go' to be great. Most of the people there are eating wings - just like her. She gets to go out to eat and people watch as well! Oh, one of the other great things about Wings To Go is the hand wipes in little pouches (wet-naps) - Grace just loves those. Every visit her little pockets (or my purse) get filled with these wipes! Grace likes to keep them folded up and use them as little squares.

When Gracie first started on the diet, she was begging people for food. The begging seems to have stopped. She is learning to handle being around people eating things that she can not eat. We tell her that this diet is to help her not have seizures - just like her medicines. She is aware enough to know that she does not like seizures and going to the hospital. Some things are yucky but they keep the seizures away. It helps that she will have this conversation with us - a few months ago she would not talk about seizures.

For all of the progress we made, we still struggle with eating days and not-eating days. Grace still has her ravenous days and days she is not at all interested in eating. She has also started swatting at people who try to give her the heavy cream and oil - more the heavy cream than the oil. We have warned her that if she swats at her teachers from school, there will be a consequence - we will take away her Barney movies. Somewhere Grace got the idea that if she makes it rough enough on us, we will not make her take what she doesn't want. I'm not sure where she got this idea because we haven't given her a free pass for bad behaviour that I can recall. We just keep working with her - and try to remember that we are the adults :-)