We went into Leicester today. I hadn't been in since Christmas, I hate cities. We went in search of stickers, plain old stickers in different shapes and colours that you can make a picture out of.
Could we find them? No hope. Every other thing you can imagine in a sticker - but squares, triangles and circles? Nowhere. If anyone knows where I can get some from - please let me know!!!
Then we went to Subways for lunch. Rich decided that it would be a good idea to let Little Acorn have some fizzy drink, I negotiated the cola to lemonade - but I knew I should just have put my foot down and said NO! We have had a distressed manic little girl all afternoon.
She appears to have several "foods" that she cannot eat - all of them contain dodgy chemicals. Aspartame is particularly bad - it always makes her mood miserable and her behaviour hyper.
Food additives and colourings seem to have the same effect. When kindly Nanny slips her some sweeties, we have dreadful trouble.
Its not usually an issue, because we don't really eat food with additives in at home.
Then we went to the hairdressers, LA has only ever been once before and found the whole thing very exciting - unfortunately at that point in time it was too much for her and she flung herself on the floor and threw a full scale tantrum the moment we walked in - her first tantrum ever.
Eventually she had her haircut and while we waited for her big brother to have his cut, she ran round and round and round the hairdressers, shouting. She was calmed down by a long extended cuddle, which seemed to remind her that she was safe and we played "i-spy" for 30 minutes.
When we got home, she threw her dinner across the table and went to sit alone on the hall. She let me join her and we talked about how she was feeling angry and sad and confused, and how she was running around and getting very angry. We talked about fizzy drinks and sweeties and how they made her feel this way and how we would try to avoid them in the future and be like Sporticus and eat Sports Candy.
I suspect we are in for a long long night...
4 comments:
Oh poor you (and LA!) - Flopsy got like that once after eating a jaffa cake - we thought it must have been the orange food colouring. It was so unlike her. She seems to be able to manage them now, though, thank goodness!
Thanks Clare.
Hopefully she will grow out of it as it rather restricts her diet and makes parties a nightmare!
She's still not good this morning, and had nightmares last night.
we have similar problems. When I finally narrowed down the main culprit to gluten, it seemed we'd have nothing left we could eat. luckily, being gluten-free means I have to cook everything from scratch, which automatically eliminates most of the other problem ingredients (preservatives, artificial colors and flavors, etc.) Anyway, our approach has always been that I tell my children to pay attention to what their bodies are telling them, reminding them that it is their choice what to eat, but to pay attention to how they feel afterwards. DD1 invented a word "atradocious" for how eating gluten makes her feel. It means angry and grouchy and scared and upset and all the other bad feelings combined.
aspartame is metabolised down to methanol. Nasty stuff methanol. My mother once gave Catherine a pack of mini M&M's. Within 20 minutes she had turned into a demon child and she remained that way for 24 hours. That was before a haircut too. As she has got bigger she seems to be able to manage small quantities of aspartame and colourings.
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