The Monster is, as anyone who’s seen him can testify, a very healthy child.  Our biggest issue with keeping him such, though, is the fact that he lives on a very limited diet.

I’ve spoken before of the fact that he tends to be a very picky eater.  It’s rarely predictable what he’s going to be willing to eat on a given day – we can take guesses based on past performance, but other than that, he’s only happy within a very limited range.

That range, however, keeps changing.

In the last week or two, he’s suddenly acquired a taste for mandarin oranges.  Just out of the blue.  There was the time that he abruptly ate pasta off my plate.  Or the fact that he happily (read: without complaint) ate brisket at Passover.  Bagels also came in out of nowhere, post Passover.

On the other hand, he’s decided on his own that he doesn’t like waffles anymore.  Pancakes are a “sometimes yes/sometimes no” food.  Finding a breakfast that he will eat before he goes out the door and off to school is a challenge on some mornings, and we’re determined to ensure that he’s not going to be starving before lunch, lest someone there thinks that we’re not feeding him properly.  (This morning is a prime example – I don’t know that he actually ate anything before school, after agreeing that he was in the mood for an orange….)

(And yes, I realize that children are always like that – ASD or NT.  My mother likes to tell of how I spent a week eating hamburgers for every meal, and I’m… well, okay, I’m not “perfectly” normal, but I’m hardly on the spectrum.)

I’m crossing my fingers that some of the strange shifting is just a phase.  We’ll see as we get out of the school year and into camp…