So, @Liam-M and I have had a good system that works for helping manage his meals at school and I have never shared, so figured it’s a good time to do so since we’ve been using it for three years or so with success.
Our system is basically this…
On the Sunday before the school week, we log into the school website and go to the Nutritional section of the website. From there, we pull up the Breakfast and Lunch menus for the following week. I have found that part to be the worst part of our experience…whoever creates these menus just don’t understand anything about diabetics so often times there will be “calorie” information but no carb/fiber information. I’ve been bugging the school system to fix it to make it more reliable for diabetics, but so far it’s hit or miss….probably 75% of the items, I’ll see carb info and 25% of the time, I won’t…regardless, we use the info they provide and make eductated guesses about the rest of the stuff.
So, once I have the menus up, I have Liam come down and we go day by day for Breakfast, then day by day for Lunch…for the entire week, and I record it in a “google sheet”…this google sheet is shared with him and the nurse so that everyone can see what he’s eating.
The workbook is set up with formulas that do the math for me ( @Liam-M created all of these formulas, btw, because I was doing it all manually using calculator and he said he’d like to mess around with the Google sheet to automate things.)
So, step by step it goes like this:
Below is an example of the Breakfast tab (I also have a Lunch tab and an “archives” tab where I collect previously eaten foods so that I can pull from that list quickly instead of having to go back and forth from the school menu.)
I change the info and carbs for each food in B2 through B6…whatever item he wants, I just swap it out and update the correct carbs for whatever item he’s eating. Then notice the formula in C2 (the highlighted cell showing in the formula bar) which basically reads the contents of the array text in B2 and extracts all the numbers from the messy text string, adds them together and appends column C with the total “carbs” from B2 and adds the “g” at the end for “grams”.
For @Liam-M , we have been bolusing 75% up front and 25% once his BGs go over 170, but lately, I’ve found that’s too much so I am starting to do 60% up front and 40% later when he rises over 170.
So, if you look at the formula in cell D2…
…you’ll notice that it takes the value in C2, removes the last character, converts what’s left into a number, multiplies that number by .6, then inserts that number into the sentence. This tells me we want him to enter 19.8g now and give full bolus for that amount of carbs.
Then column E, IF / once he crosses above 170, we give the remaining 25%..see formula below:
…so same as column D, it removes the g, converts the rest to a number, multiplies by the remaining .4 then inserts that number into the sentence (so basically outputs 40% of whatever carb value is stored in C2.)
So, our process takes under 1 to 2 minutes each Sunday to figure out what he’s eating next week and the exact carbs/bolus he should give for those carbs…everything completely automated (again, thanks to @Liam-M for the automation…I was happy doing the manual, lazy method but I appreciate him taking on the challenge and killing it.) He values his “play time” so anything he can do to be done with the mundane, he’ll invest time up front to save time in the long run.
Anyway, I’m posting this here for any parents of kids who are diabetic and you don’t really have a good system…this has been an amazing system for Liam and I. He has “Google Sheets” installed on his phone and it’s an icon on his phone desktop…he just clicks to open it, scrolls to the meal, enters those carbs and boluses, and it’s done.
Sometimes he’ll have something different than what’s on the menu and we just “sugar surf” / make educated guesses for those meal items.
Hopefully this helps someone out there! If you have questions or concerns, I’ll be happy to help and I’d even be willing to se up a custom one for you if you need, or a template that you can use for your own child.
Cheers!
Justified congratulations to Liam.