Cold

Sometimes I fail. Sometimes I don’t go the extra mile for my daughter. Sometimes I take the easy option. Like today.

Tonight, my daughter should be at her last Girl Guides meeting before Christmas. But she won’t be.

It's an outside meeting, involving a long walk in the cold to look at the Christmas Lights, and ending up with a pit stop for chip shop chips on the Market Square.

I started my usual stream of consciousness plan of action in my head: “Right, she’ll need her thermal gloves and socks on, but her hands and feet will still be cold, because of her poor circulation, which means she’ll feel more hungry and more tired, because the cold does that to her, also she obviously can’t have chips, so I should send her with a bag of Skips as an alternative because they’re reasonably low calorie, but what about the smell of the chips, that'll be torture, and then they said they’re also having a hot chocolate, well, where from, and will they be able to give her ‘light’ hot choc if I provide it, and where exactly will they be at 8pm, because she's so obsessive about her bedtime lately I've been picking her up from Guides half an hour early , but if they're out and about how easy will this be?”

And then I stopped.

I was tired. I should have organised this before. It would just be easier if she didn’t go.

This is why I looked at my daughter and I said: “Do you really want to go? And watch all the other girls eat chips? And get cold and exhausted?”  

Of course, when I put it like that, she said “No”.

I’m not very proud of those questions. They were too harsh, too leading, and too cold. They go against the grain. Against our usual ethos of sorting stuff out, working out wonky, roundabout solutions, and finding alternative ways for her to join in. 

It wasn't my finest hour.

Song is The Ruts - It Was Cold

Locked

"Quavers are better than Skips which are better than French Fries which are better than Monster Munch which are better than Walkers which are WAY better than Kettle Chips.
Mini Milks are better than Twisters which are better than Fabs which are better than Fruit Pastel lollies which are better than Calyppos but STEER CLEAR of Magnums.
Mini Jaffa Cakes are better than a box of raisins which is better than a Go Ahead Yoghurt Break which is better than an Alpen Bar but don’t even THINK about a Mars Bar.
Chips are bad. Cheese is evil. Fruit is my friend."

This isn't an actual quote from my daughter. But I'm pretty sure it's what runs through her head. (Well maybe not the 'cheese is evil' bit). The gospels according to calories and saturated fat content are somehow drummed into my daughter’s very soul. She’s spent all her life having her food controlled, as she needs a strict, low-fat diet to maintain a normal weight. 

At the moment, on the very rare occasions she is offered something she shouldn’t be offered (at a new hairdressers, where they give kids who have a haircut a sweet, or when a new classmate brings in choccy bars to hand out on their birthday), it’s HER that declines.

“I’m not allowed that,” she’ll say. For a girl who’s always physically hungry, this is pretty impressive.

She will twig. One day. It will suddenly hit her that by keeping quiet she could get extra and no-one would know. She will realise that sneaking into a kitchen cupboard and nabbing some grub, then trotting off to scoff it out of sight, just might work, dammit.

I’m dreading it. 
But I’ve got a pack of locks ready.

Video is Crowded House - Locked Out

Bones

Question: How does someone know that they shouldn’t eat the bone on a chicken drumstick, if they’ve never had a chicken drumstick before?

Answer: They don’t.

If cooking chicken for my daughter, in accordance with my husband’s motto in life - "Always go for the breast" -  I’ll pick healthier, skinless cuts.

But there was this one occasion, running late, frazzled, and faced with a poorly-stocked Co-op shelf, when I grabbed a pack of chicken drumsticks.

Having cooked them, I plonked one down in front of my girl, along with some new potatoes and a mountain of salad, and then proceeded to knock over a glass of orange juice all over the table, chair, floor, radiator and wall. My attention was elsewhere for a good few minutes.

When I looked back, my daughter’s plate was clean, apart from a few splinters of bone.

Five hours later, the A & E doctor finally saw us, felt her throat and belly, and announced that it must have been a reasonably soft bone, and my daughter must have “munched the bejaysus out of it”, because there were no bits stuck anywhere they shouldn’t have been.

Prader-Willi Syndrome means you’re constantly, overwhelmingly hungry. And when someone is controlling your portion sizes, you’re damn well going to eat every last bit.

So she did.

Video is The Bees - Chicken Payback

Video is Elbow - The Bones Of You.