Brunch?

The fifth grade eats lunch at 10:17 a.m. 

"Most of my friends don't seem to mind," was the report.
 
My daughter minds.  A lot.  Because she's a normal person. 

Her response to the problem is our challenge.

The first day, she ate most of her lunch.  The second day she ended up in the nurse's office chugging a juice box since she'd bolused the carbs and then decided she couldn't finish. 

Over the weekend, the lunch issue became an all-consuming, awful problem in the way problems do best when you're in middle school.  All of the anxiety about every aspect of this new school experience was funneled into the lunch predicament and there was no possible solution.

By day three, she had herself so worked up about it that she was sick to her stomach.

Thankfully she's pumping, so we have some flexibility in eating patterns.  But from a regular-people perspective, she has to eat something between 7:40 a.m. and 2:52 p.m., and keep it down.

While she's got flexibility, she's used to eating regular meals on a regular schedule.  It's likely that while the pump allows for different mealtimes, a regular eating pattern makes it easier to keep her blood sugar more stable. Perhaps most significantly, it's her preference (which isn't really odd at all) to eat lunch at noon-ish and small snacks between meals.

Yes, she has her 504 plan which would allow her to eat anytime.  But she can't eat while practicing  the keyboard during music class.  Or while trying to do weather experiments in science.  And, along with every other middle school child, she doesn't want to be 'different' any more than she has to be.  So we seek a way to make this schedule work. 

Our next experiment is two snacks.  One at 10:17, and one at 2, when all 5th graders are allowed to snack if they need to.  A generous policy to make up for the ridiculous lunchtime.  She can then have another substantial 'snack' when she returns home.

Today the anxiety seemed to be dissipating a bit.  Yesterday she ate her two snacks and spent the whole lunch period with friends instead of the nurse.

Perhaps an omlette station in the cafeteria would help.