They were delighted to realize I had a pomegranate in the house. We normally classify pomegranates as fancy holiday fare, because of their more typical $2.50+ price tag, but I'd stopped into a Food Lion by chance yesterday, and they were selling them for $0.99 each!
I used a chef's knife to crack open the pom (YouTube has a TON of videos on pomegranate prep, watch them for great tips!), and after pulling it apart into sections, I could hardly pry the seeds out of the inside fast enough for the four little hands to grab them off the plate.
Their faces and hands quickly slicked with the delicious red juice, my youngest started counting the arils, "One, two, three." She has made real, very noticeable strides in the time since we overhauled her diet. When we first started buckling down on diet, after her diagnoses, she was 26 months old, using around 20 words clumsily, incompletely and inconsistently. She wandered around in a fog, with little eye contact. At most we were getting her to try one new word in a week, but those rarely stuck. Her language development essentially froze sometime in the middle of her second year of life, and stayed stuck until we changed her diet - this dietary jump-start to her progress was observed and acknowledged by my mother-in-law (a retired speech therapist) and our current speech therapist.
At six weeks shy of three years old, she now counts to twenty, knows all of her colors, all of her shapes, and recognizes the entire alphabet and numerals on sight. Her language development is pacing nicely - she recently tested as being developmentally on track for her verbal articulation skills, and her spontaneous combinations of 3-4 words have been increasing in frequency. Instead of being roughly a year behind on language (as she was this spring), she is now probably only a few months delayed in certain aspects of language. Her sensory processing disorder symptoms have also been blunted a bit - she does not grind her teeth or squeeze my arm until it hurts as intensely and as frequently as she used to. Perhaps most charmingly, she has developed a lot of social skills that I had not seen before - saying, "Hi!" to strangers in public places, making steadier eye contact in general, and mentioning friends, classmates, and teachers by name.
Has diet fixed everything 100%? No. But it unquestionably got the ball to recovery rolling, and has bolstered and supported a diligent therapy schedule. My daughter will probably always have sensory issues to manage, but I rest in the knowledge that her progress now reflects a future with increasingly fewer, if any, limits.
