Special Needs Vacation Planning: Food Edition

Zoe enjoying a snack plate on
Thanksgiving last year

One of the main challenges we have faced in vacationing with our daughter with special needs is planning how we’re going to feed her. Her facial paralysis and sensory issues limit the types of foods she can eat. At home, it’s become second nature; some of her staples are vanilla Greek yogurt and the Gerber oatmeal cereals with added fruit for breakfast, applesauce for lunch (find our recipe here), and lasagna or sweet potatoes for dinner. She also loves avocado; once mashed, it mixed nicely with Greek yogurt or a banana. Her dinners typically have more variety; I usually cook for more than one night at a time, and we’ll use some of the leftovers to make her food. We run it through the blender, adding a liquid or a thickening agent to get it to the consistency we want it, and then we freeze portions in 8 ounce canning jars to reheat for her later. 

So that all seems pretty straightforward when we’re home, but when we aren’t home, we have to be a bit more creative to make sure she stays fed. When we’re just going out to eat, that looks like taking her food along with us. We’ll grab one of our frozen jars, microwave it to a bit warmer than she likes it and then take it to the restaurant with us to feed her there. Sometimes, there will be food at the restaurant she can eat, but she’s also autistic, and lately she’s preferred to eat the food we bring because it’s familiar. That varies, and we try to accommodate her whichever way she’s leaning that day. Restaurants are typically very understanding, and we are rarely charged for food for her, even at buffet restaurants. Disney World has several meals that are buffet, but right now, even more are “family style,” which means they will bring all of the offerings (of a set menu) to the table on large platters for you to serve yourself. Family style meals are “all you care to enjoy,” so like a buffet, you can get more of whichever items you’d like, and you’re charged a set rate per person for the meal. On our most recent trip, we had nine table service restaurant meals, and I think only one of them took individual orders. Most were family style, and a few were buffet; we knew that we may be charged for her food before we went, and we were willing to pay for it, but we were only charged once. It was the most expensive of them, but it was also a character meal, so even though she didn’t eat the food, she was still able to enjoy the fun atmosphere and meeting the characters. The prices for those meals are inflated with that in mind; think, dinner and a show.

So anyway, preparing her food for a 10 day vacation takes a lot of thought, creativity and just logistical planning. We want to plan food that won’t sour while we’re out for the day at a Disney park without a refrigerator and that won’t be cold, gross and congealed by the time she’s ready to eat. We get better at it the more we do it, and beach trips are easy now. This Disney trip took a bit more though. Here’s what we did.

We took some of her vanilla Greek yogurt in 8 ounce jars, so it’s already portioned out, and that was her breakfast the first few days. We knew we’d need one the first day for breakfast on the road (we leave our house about 4:00-5:00am and stop for breakfast once people are starting to wake up and get hungry), and we planned to have a resort day (not in the parks) every two days. So we wanted to have breakfast for those two days and our first resort day, and then we bought more yogurt to refill those jars on the third day when we made a grocery run since we weren’t in a park that day. 

                  

For lunch, we brought frozen applesauce jars for those first few days as well, along with a full container of plain applesauce and a ziplock of the mix-ins I add to it, all measured out, ready to stir in to make more and refill those jars once they’re empty. 

The mix-in bag is just all of the dry ingredients from my applesauce recipe measured out and mixed together. (I also brought an extra bag of my mix-ins in case we had jars break or something so that I could easily buy more applesauce and make more food if we need it. We ended up bringing the second one back home with us, but I’ll use it to make the next batch.) I will add that we had a full kitchen at the resort, so that definitely helped with doing some of her food prep during the week once we were already there. We’ve done that both ways, but having a kitchen works so much better for us; they supply a large bowl, utensils, dishwasher, microwave, refrigerator/freezer, etc. There is also usually a blender already in the room; we used it for the Hormel meals.

For dinner, we brought a selection of the jars we had already made at home, some Hormel Compleats meals to give her some more variety, a handful of avocados and some packets of instant mashed potatoes. Instant mashed potatoes have become a recent favorite travel staple for us to bring along for her because they are so easy to bring, taste good, and we can make them anywhere; all we need is a bowl and hot water. If we’re in a restaurant, some butter and milk or cream make it even better and add some calories (which we always need), but if we don’t have those things, it still tastes good. We just need a bowl and hot water; our favorite one is the loaded mashed potatoes. Any restaurant will bring you hot water, even at a gas station or fast food place, and I carry a collapsible silicone bowl (a new addition to the bag and one I’m proud I thought of) and one of her        preferred spoons all the time.

 Now, one thing we ran into on our last Disney trip is the “no glass allowed,” rule in the parks. Since it was her food (and they DO allow actually baby food jars), they let it slide that trip. We were only in the park 2 days, and didn’t have another plan. Since we knew about the rule ahead of time for this trip, I wanted to find a solution though. For her breakfast, sometimes we ate in the resort before a park day, and sometimes we had a breakfast reservation before the park; on days we took her food to a restaurant, we usually just threw the jar away before heading into the park. A couple of times we forgot and got stopped by security, and they threw away the empty jar. For her applesauce, we thawed it enough that we could transfer it to a plastic jar (a cleaned out and reused peanut butter jar), and then let the Florida heat thaw it the rest of the way; it took most of the day so she usually ate that for dinner, and then her dinner food we heated up quite a bit hotter than she likes it and put it in an insulated soup container. That didn’t stay warm the whole day, so she ate that for lunch while it was still warm and the applesauce for dinner since it started out frozen. We also carried pudding cups for her and pediasure; she drinks 2 bottles of that per day.

This is what worked for us; it probably won’t be the best solution for every situation, but I hope it helps someone. At the very least, maybe there’s an idea that can be tweaked to work if you’re looking for ideas.We’ve planned like this for so long that it seems simple in my head, but then I type it out, and it sounds crazy and convoluted. If there is anything I can clarify or a question I can answer, please let me know.