Meal planning, Afloat style

This is not a post about planning out your family's meals a week or weeks in advance and shopping accordingly. I am not and will probably never be that person. And it's not about planning out all the meals for the approaching three-day-yom tov (holiday). I am that person, but I'm a little behind this year.

No, this is about planning meals around meds.

E. has begun a supplement that he has to take in the morning and at night, with food. It's a fairly large capsule full of powder, and since E. can't swallow a sprinkle, we open it up. For whatever reason, it doesn't dissolve well in liquid, so the old grape juice standby is gone. We have to dissolve it in food.

It isn't nearly as disgusting as his Strattera, but it does have a taste. I tried apple sauce, and he hated it. Tried his favorite mushroom-barley soup- no go. Putting it on top of a solid doesn't work because it has to be hidden; if he knows it's there, he won't eat it.

So what works? Spaghetti sauce and chumus (aka hummus). That seems to be about it.

I repeat- he has to take this every day. And he has to take all of it. I can get him to eat chummus every morning, or at least most of it, as long as I have Wheat Thins. And if I get it to him just when he starts looking for food to eat. But the spaghetti sauce is easiest served on pasta, which I don't always have. So what do I do? And what if he's not in the mood for chummus? Or to eat his pasta?

So I came up with strategy. The supper must be served the second he walks in the door from school, so that he doesn't eat anything else that might spoil his appetite for what I want him to eat.

And the capsule has to be dissolved in when he's not looking, which is easy with dinner because I do it before he gets home but not with breakfast, where I have to block the food with my body and ask him to get me something from the next room. Which can backfire if he gets interested in something there and decides he doesn't want to eat anything anymore.

See? Takes lots of planning.