I am a home based daycare caretaker. I just started today with a six year old girl with type 1 diabetes. She has only so many carb’s to use at meals and snacks. I explained her condition to the older children. This is all so overwhelming. The mom brought me a book listing tons of carbs. Is there a place I can surf to or have them send me some info on meals and snacks? You know some basics examples to work from to get the hang of this. I know it is basically just a matter of training myself with information. Any help would be much appreciated to make this little girl a happy part of my home.

You sound like a very caring day-care provider. The child with diabetes is so lucky. I can give you the web sites of several books for carbohydrate counting, but it sounds like you have that information and it is quite overwhelming. If you search the web on carbohydrate counting, there are some very simple examples and explanations for what we are trying to do with carbohydrate counting.

Basically, I would start out with easy-to-calculate meals. For example if she has 5 carbs for lunch, and your lunch is hot dogs, buns, carrot sticks, piece of fruit. The whole bun is 2 carbohydrates and a small piece of fruit is 1 carb. If she drinks 1 cup milk, that is 1 carb. If you add a small sugar cooky, that is 1 carb. Total would be 5 carbs with the cooky. If she does not want the hot dog bun, about 1 cup of juice would substitute for that or 2 small pieces of fruit. Then kind of go from there and maybe the day you want to do mac and cheese, look up the portion size and amount of carbs she would get from that.

Anyway, here are the specific sites with carb counters available:

Carbohydrate Counting by Corinne Netzer
Diabetes Carb and Fat Counter
Carbohydrate Counting by Kulkarni.

LSF