REAL LIFE
A rare disorder means Jordanna Tait can’t take her eyes off her daughter – as three-year-old Dolly will eat literally anything
With any toddler, you need eyes in the back of your head. But mum-of-one Jordanna Tait, 25, has to be more watchful than most as her daughter, Dolly, three, has a rare disorder and regularly tries to eat inedible objects including books, furniture, shoes – and even the walls of their home.
“Dolly was a lockdown baby,” says Jordanna, from Bradford, West Yorkshire. “She was born at the start of the pandemic in March 2020. It meant I wasn’t going to the usual baby groups where I might have compared her to other babies and we barely saw a health visitor in her first year.
“To me she was just a really good baby, who rarely cried. It was my mum, who used to work as a nursery manager and has had three girls of her own, who first mentioned something wasn’t quite right” Dolly was almost one when Jordanna’s mother Marcia, 49, suggested she wasn’t hitting her expected milestones. “Dolly wouldn’t react at all when you said her name,” recalls Jordanna. “It was like she was in her own little world.
TERRIFYING
“We looked online and began to wonder if she might be showing signs of autism, but again, because of the pandemic, I struggled to get an appointment with a GP.”
Dolly was around 16 months old when things took a frightening turn.
Jordanna says, “We were moving house, so I had packing boxes stacked in the corner of Dolly’s bedroom. I noticed a massive hole in one of them and realised the edges looked like bite marks. I later found the missing cardboard in Dolly’s nappy. She’d eaten it all.”
It was soon afterwards that Jordanna noticed chunks of Dolly’s Peppa Pig bed frame had also been chewed away. Once again the sharp shards of wood ended up in Dolly’s nappy.
‘It was terrifying,” says Jordanna. “I hated to think what wood and cardboard might do to her insides.” Incredibly, despite desperately trying, Jordanna still struggled to get a GP appointment and had to manage the problem alone.
“I kept everything I could hidden away, or out of reach,” she explains. “Dolly loved her picture books, but if I left her alone, she’d just eat them. One time I even found three of the rubber buttons from the remote control when I changed her.
“Even with everything tidied away out of sight, she’d take chunks out of the wooden TV stand, or her bedroom wall.”
POWERLESS
Constantly monitoring D
