The Hot Dog diet

I continue to be genuinely amazed with the progress Nick is making this year. He brought tears to my eyes a couple different times today. First of all, we were picking up the play room and he found a picture book that I made for him while he was in therapy through ITS. I remember taking pictures around the house of items that we thought Nick was familiar enough with the identify. The pictures were of a dog, slide, Elmo, cup, book, banana and ball. I remember how excited we were when we would show him two pictures and ask, "which one is Elmo?" and he would point to the right picture. Today, he brings me the book, points to the dog and says, "PUPPY!" I agreed that it was a puppy and started asking him to name the rest of the pictures. He names, Elmo, slide, ball and banana....and then I point to the book and ask him "what is that?" He says, "Lion, ROOOOAR!" I'm getting ready to call him crazy and correct him when I realize that there is, in fact a lion on the front of the book :) Such a smart boy!

Later on, Nick brings up a toy train, hooks all the cars together and starts pushing it around. He puts a stuffed bear in the conductor's seat. I am chuckling and proud of his pretend play when I hear him say, "choo, choo, all aboard!" I know that none of this seems like a big deal to people with typically developing kiddos, but it's such a big thing for us. We spent a year and a half in therapy with ITS teaching Nick how to play with toys. When he first started in therapy, he would mostly play with toys in one of three ways. #1, if it is a car he will turn it over and play with the wheels or generally try to figure out how it works or how it is put together. (He's very smart and analytical in this way....we used to call him our little engineer). #2, He would stack toys on top of each other.....whether they were meant to be stacked or not. #3, He would fill a bucket or whatever up with toys and dump it into another container, over and over and over. So...there were many agonizing hours of not allowing Nick to do these things and teaching him the correct way to play. To make a long story short, this is why we are so excited when we see Nick engaging in pretend play such as putting a teddy bear in the conductor's car of a train and driving it around while saying, "choo choo."

I should also mention another source of excitement from today. I am crossing my fingers that the so-called "Hot Dog diet" may be coming to an end. We started Nick on the GFCF diet in June 2009 which does not give him a ton of food choices for meals. So began, the "Hot Dog diet." There are several brands of hot dogs which are GFCFSF (Gluten, Casein and Soy free) which is the original diet we started with. Nick ate hot dogs every day....for breakfast and lunch. We made every effort to cook special meals that he was able to eat. We were able to make pizza, pasta, chicken, quesadillas and even "macaroni and no cheese." For some reason, Nick just prefers the hot dogs and asks for them ALL THE TIME.....even asks for them at breakfast fairly often. Anyway, we have quite the stockpile of hot dogs and while we do encourage him to eat other stuff; we tend to fall back on them pretty often. So, imagine my shock when I asked Nick whether he wanted chicken or hot dogs for lunch and he responded, "chicken." You could've knocked me over with a feather!! Here's hoping that the hot dog diet has finally run it's course....but not holding my breath :)