“Brawndo’s got what plants crave! It’s got electrolytes!”
“Look, what are electrolytes, do you even know?”
“It’s… what they use to make Brawndo.”

Okay, so let me demystify: electrolytes are salts. Not only straight table salt, but the group of salts according to the periodic table. They’re necessary because your body needs to maintain the proper balance of salts and water in your cells, and when you sweat or urinate a lot — or more notably, when you have the loose/frequent bowel problems commonly associated with autistic individuals — you lose salts faster than you can take them in from food, and your whole metabolic process works less efficiently. But in the end, yes, it’s all just a form of salt water.

So why would you want to pay a ton of money for the privilege of having a bunch of artificial dyes and chemical sweeteners added to your salt water? I certainly wouldn’t. Oh hey I know, let’s make our own!

First, take an empty water bottle, preferably with a lid so you can shake it up when it’s ready. Then add 1/16 of a teaspoon of Potassium Chloride. For the accountants out there, note that that’s $4 for 648 servings. You can get tiny measuring spoons here, and while they give them useless names like “pinch” and “smidge,” the five spoons are actually 1/4 tsp, 1/8 tsp, 1/16 tsp, 1/32 tsp and 1/64 tsp. Alternatively, you could make it in larger batches so you could use the larger measuring spoons you already own.

Next, add 1/16 of a teaspoon of baking soda, AKA sodium bicarbonate. See, salts! Again, this ingredient goes for less than $1 for 1,612 servings.

Fill the drink bottle with about 8 ounces of water, which should hopefully leave you with some space at the top, unless you have a particularly undersized container.

Fill that remaining space with the fruit juice of your choice. And that’s it! You’ve just made your own Pedialyte/Whatever-ade, with no extra junk and for only a few pennies (including the cost of the juice — not counting the juice, it’s a small fraction of a penny.)

Of course you could always add a little more juice if they don’t like it so watered down. You could also use 1/2 Tablespoon of honey instead, or even a bit of granulated sugar. But it is important to use some form of sweetener, not only to cover the mild salty flavor, but also because a small amount of glucose is actually necessary to help with absorption. It’s all about the chemistry, baby.

Happy Rehydrating!

Electrolyte Drink

8 oz. water
1/16 tsp potassium chloride
1/16 tsp baking soda
2 TBS fruit juice, or more as desired

1.) Search high and low for a good-tasting liquid version — except of course the bottles lie, they never actually taste good.

2.) Open the capsules (or crush the pills,) and mix them in a large spoonful of applesauce, or jelly, or cupcake frosting, whatever the hell it takes to hide the taste.

3.) Realize that there are some supplements that you just can’t make palatable, no matter what you do… so you dump everything together in a little cup with some liquid, suck them up with an oral syringe, and just make the kid take them. (I know there are a couple of you out there who are thinking that’s just so mean… but if your kid were diabetic, you’d give him his insulin injections everyday, wouldn’t you? When a medicine is necessary to get better, there’s no arguing about it, in my book.)

To be sure, one of the best investments we ever made was an ABA skills clinic that taught my son to swallow pills on his own, just after his 4th birthday. But before that happened, I did develop a pretty good syringe technique that I still use with his little sister, and I thought I would share.

[As always, please remember that nothing on this site is to be construed as medical advice. Consult with your ARI practitioner for what medicines may be appropriate for your child's condition.]

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First thing, of course, is to get yourself some good oral syringes. I bought a huge bag of these a long time ago, and when the rubber seal starts to get dodgy after a couple months I just toss it and use another. You can get them online in relatively small quantities, too.

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The important thing about this kind is it comes with a little blue cap, which is critical to this technique. Put the cap on the tip, and put a tiny trickle of water into the open end of the syringe. Try to keep it under 2 milliliters.

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Then, stand your syringe on its capped end, and open however many capsules you need to administer. See, when you try to mix it in a cup first and then suck it into the syringe, you usually end up with med sludge stuck on the bottom of the cup. So you have to add more liquid, suck again, add more liquid… and before long you’ve got 5 syringes’ worth of nasty stuff instead of just one.

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When all your powders are in, add another tiny trickle of water on top, again shooting for only a milliliter. The water layer at the bottom will ensure that the powder gets fully mixed and doesn’t just hide in the tip. Do not fill the syringe all the way, you need the air space for turbulence.

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Place your finger firmly over the open end, and shake vigorously.

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Now, insert the plunger just enough to get it to stick in place. This is not something you should be doing with one hand, but I had a camera to hold onto.

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Turn it upright, remove the cap, and very gently push the excess air out of the tip of the syringe. Now you’re ready to make your kid miserable for a second — but it’ll be considerably less miserable, and less mess, than it would be if you had to drag it out into a half-dozen syringes of increasingly dilute med sludge. Then chase it with another syringe full of fruit juice: not only will it wash the taste away, which is more effective than trying to hide it in the first place, but it will also teach them that not everything that comes out of a syringe is horrid.

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On a tangential note, these things are fantastic for giving measured doses of medicines that come in topical creams. The minimum order of 25 ain’t so great, but your local compounding pharmacy might order them and sell you a couple individually, or maybe you and some friends could go in on a bag together.

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Happy Supplementing!

But what if you don’t own a sewing machine? Or like me, you do technically own one, but you’re not exactly ready to go on next season’s Project Runway with it?

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The solution is one of these. Except instead of making a giant single-layer quilt, we’re going to double up the squares so that each one makes a pocket. The end result will be six squares by four squares, or about 4 feet by 2 1/2 feet. It’s not huge, but it’s plenty big enough for a child’s body.

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The kit has 8 squares of each color, so match them into pairs for four pockets of each color. Granted, the rainbow color scheme is a little on the girly side, but you could always go the extra mile and buy a few yards of whatever fleece color you wanted, and cut out all the little tabs yourself. (Though at some point, it becomes easier to just learn how to sew instead…) Make sure to put the smooth sides facing each other, and the fuzzy sides facing out. Then knot together every other tab pair, on three sides only.

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The remaining tabs will be for tying each pocket to the ones next to it. Doing all your pockets on three sides will definitely take some time, but once I got into the groove I was able to do one pocket in about 5 minutes — and hey, it is designed to be a kids’ craft project, after all, so maybe your young one will even be able to help you.

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Eventually, it will be time to load them with weight and close each one up. The drawback to the traditional dried beans or rice is that they may grow mold over time. You can also buy plastic pellets online, which is what all commercial “bean bags” are actually filled with these days, but some people have voiced concerns about the plastic off-gassing over time. I don’t have the energy to fully research which pellets might be safest, so instead, I decided to use these smooth river rocks from Michael’s craft store. They sell smaller ones, too, but I chose these large rocks on purpose. The GFCFGirl has a lot of auditory sensitivities, and the white noise of grinding gravel is specifically irritating to her. In contrast, these larger stones make a very satisfying low-pitched clack noise.

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But regardless of size, 2 pound bags of stones were only $2.49 each. The amount of weight you use will depend on your child’s size and preference, but I went with an even 10 pounds. There are six colors in the quilt kit, so first divide all your rocks into six equal piles.

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Then subdivide each pile evenly between the four pockets of each color. Close them up (again tying only every other tab pair,) and you’re ready to start assembling your blanket.

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You may find it helpful to tuck in all the tied pairs so that it’s easier to see what you’re doing. It’s going to get pretty tangled here in a minute.

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Line up your tabs with the square you want to put next to it, and tie each section twice: bottom tab to bottom tab, and top to top. Make sure to pull each one tight enough that there’s no gap remaining, otherwise smaller rocks might leak out. And if you get confused halfway through about where your tabs were supposed to line up, no big deal – just grab loose ends and tie them to other loose ends until it’s all snug. Once you have four squares across, start the next line of squares above it.

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Tie off the tabs all around the outer edge, and you’re done! In my house we have to do everything in twos to make it fair, so I actually combined my two knot-a-quilt kits, to give the GFCFGirl all the purple, pink and yellow squares, and the GFCFBoy all the blue, green and orange squares. One of the few fringe benefits of having multiple kids on the spectrum. Nyuck nyuck nyuck…

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Happy Knotting!

Look closely and you’ll see they’re (mostly) in alphabetical order. And does it bug me that those four spices on the left aren’t the same brand as all the others? You bet it does. But McCormick just doesn’t make those spices in this line of bottles, so I’m out of luck.

Anyway, the point I’m getting to is, while sometimes this level of organization can be indicative of a mental condition, sometimes it can also be really helpful when your dietary lifestyle requires so much more cooking and meal planning than most people’s.

Witness, for example, my collection of baking mixes. Once I’ve already got all the ingredients out for making waffles, or bread, or whathaveyou, it takes virtually no extra time at all to scoop out a second, third, or even fourth dose of everything into little plastic containers on the side. Then a week later, when I’m flustered at the idea that it’s already time to make muffins again, I remember with joy that half the work is already done! Even if you’re not baking as often as I am, the dry ingredients will keep in the pantry just as well mixed together as they do separately, so why not?

This is actually a pretty diverse collection for me right now; usually you’d see more duplicates of the staples in my cabinet. The teff bread is a new experiment (just using my standard bread recipe, but substituting teff flour,) so we’ll see how that one turns out some afternoon when I’m feeling adventurous.

But here’s where the real neurosis kicks in. This, ladies and gentlemen, is the left half of my refrigerator. (Don’t you just love my frog pen-holder? So do I.) This is like the Gutenburg Bible of meal planning. I have a little magnet for every meal and side our family routinely eats, and I just pull whatever I want out of the main collection in the middle, and lay it out in the weekly schedule above.

This is helpful from a general meal-planning standpoint of course, in the sense that I have to know what I’m making when I go buy groceries. But the real reason this system works for me is because I have all my options laid out in front of me at all times. I have a big problem with inspiration in the kitchen — like the proverbial woman who stands in her closet saying “I have nothing to wear,” I can stand in a kitchen chock full of groceries and have no idea what to make with them. I’ve had great recipes fall off my radar for months at a time, because I just forgot about them. Now, instead of having to flip through my entire recipe box every week, I can take everything in with a quick glance. What’s more, when I move stuff down out of the week again, I put it at the bottom of the stack, so the items at the top are always the ones I haven’t made in awhile. It’s important to rotate your product!

But where, you may ask, did I get a magnetic poetry kit of my own recipe box? Why, I made it myself! Avery makes these great magnetic paper sheets, ready to load right into the printer. It’s $10 for 5 pages, which seems like a lot per page, but I used just a little over half of one page to print everything I needed for this project. Rather than try to run weird sizes of paper through my printer, I cut the rest of the remaining page into blank strips, and now when a new recipe comes along, I just handwrite a magnet for it. I also have a useful little marker for “New Recipe” and “New Side” for the schedule, so if the recipe’s a dud I haven’t wasted any magnetic paper on it.

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Since school lunches are kind of a different beast altogether, I color-coded all those standard items in green and keep them organized down the right hand side by food group, so it’s easier to be sure the kids have a balanced lunchbox.

In a few more years I’m hoping I can get them to start helping to make their own lunches, and when that time comes I’m thinking I’ll reprint all the lunch choices in a bigger font and tell the kids they can pick whatever they want as long as they get one item from each group.

The magnet paper is great for other things too — memorable business cards, little school fundraiser items, picture puzzles… I don’t know about you, but there’s no limit to the number of things I can stick to my fridge.

Happy Organizing!

This isn’t a food recipe, but it’s something I make at home that I thought would be useful to share with others. Epsom salt baths are sometimes recommended for autistic children (see this FAQ from the Epsom Salt Council for a brief explanation why,) but the baths have never been successful in my house. For one thing, they dry out the skin and leave a gross white residue. For another, if epsom salts are taken orally they have a strong laxative effect, and my kids are both habitual bathwater-drinkers. Yes, it’s disgusting. Yes, we work hard to make them stop. But one stray mouthful, and it’s all over.

You can buy expensive sulfate lotions online, but as I’m here to show you, it’s very easy to make your own for a fraction of the cost. These are epsom salts, AKA magnesium sulfate. This giant four-pound bag was like $2.00.

Put 8 Tablespoons in a clear glass bowl. (This is the same as 1/2 cup, but I can’t seem to scoop that out of the bag without spilling the stupid salts everywhere, so I use a smaller measuring spoon.)

Add 3/4 cup of water, and stir. The quantity of salts you want to mix up is going to depend on the amount of lotion you’re starting with. My lotion comes in 16 oz. bottles; so if yours is 12 oz., use 6 TBS salts in 1/2 cup water, etc.

All of the salts need to be completely dissolved. This is why it’s a good idea to use a clear glass bowl, so you can really see how you’re doing. Pop it in the microwave for one minute at a time to help it along, and keep stirring. Don’t add any more water, we’re going for supersaturation here.

That’s better. You can still see a few stray crystals, but I stirred it some more after I took this picture, I promise.

Now just dump in your lotion. It’s best to use the thickest lotion you can find, but a lot of the thickest creams have gluten in them (like my favorite brand that I used to use before they changed their formula… jerks.) The thicker ones also tend to be oil-based, and this will not work for our mixture, because the oil and water will want to separate in the container. So make sure the lotion you choose doesn’t have things like “petroleum” or “mineral oil” high on the ingredients list.

Me, I’ve kind of given up on finding a really thick GFCF lotion, and I’ve just been using Baby Magic since my old brand added gluten (did I mention they’re jerks?) The final product is kinda watery, but it gets the job done. If you do know of a nice thick GFCF lotion, please post a comment and let me know! You can, of course, put less saltwater in your lotion to begin with, but you won’t be getting as much bang for your buck when you apply the lotion to your skin.

You’re going to end up with almost twice the volume of lotion that you started with, so it’s not going to fit back in the original bottle. I like to store it in these wide-mouthed tubs instead, which are just old containers of my thick lotion with the labels peeled off. (Peeled off angrily? Maybe.) Any airtight container will do, but I wouldn’t recommend anything with a pump. Over time, even water-based lotions are going to separate from the salts a little, and pumps will tend to clog. But just give your container a good shake every once in awhile and you’ll be fine.

Happy Lotioning!