Dietary Woes

I think what it boils down to is that I'm just afraid of change. I think that is why I have been resisting these serious allergies. I don't want to own six different types of flour or learn how to make gluten free sourdough. I want my body to just work like everyone else's bodies...

For a long time I was able to tolerate einkorn flour with no issues. Now when I try einkorn flour I get a massive asthma attack about 30 minutes later and inflammation problems, especially in my legs. It hurts. I have tried it three times over the past few months and each time the same reaction. Devastation doesn't begin to cover the scope of my emotions. 

Something changed in the last year somewhere and now I cannot have einkorn flour or einkorn products. I must adjust.

All of our cookbooks have arrived. I am starting at a tower of four gluten, dairy, egg and soy free cookbooks and hoping they hold the answers I need to organize my culinary woes.

Here are our allergies:

Me: Gluten, alpha gal (all mammal products including butter, milk, cow...even trace amounts)

Becky: Severely lactose intolerant. Chocolate, Eggs, Chicken and all bird products (like turkey) (and something else hurts her we have to figure it out....) Her allergies are all gut allergies and present as severe stomach pain, vomiting...you get the idea. It isn't "oh I have a stomach ache" it's her doubled over in pain crying and not able to eat for several hours bad.  

Reuben: mildly lactose intolerant. Anaphylactic to avocado, and raw banana (he can have cooked banana) and even someone eating a banana next to him can majorly bother him. He gets a tight throat, mild hives from beans, some melon, kiwi, and uncooked bell peppers and peppers of any kind. He can have cooked peppers. I have never tried to cook the kiwi and give it to him. He cannot have most beans but lentils and garbanzo beans are fine for him. He also has a latex allergy. 

Brian: severely lactose intolerant.  has the bean allergy but can do lentils. He can do garbanzo beans the first time I sprout and cook them but cannot eat garbanzo beans as leftovers. I don't get it. He also seems to react to tomatoes and chili powder... but says he loves them and please don't worry about it (I worry about it)

Esther: The pea in the pod who seems she is just mildly lactose intolerant. A blessing, a ray of sunshine in the midst of our sea of food woes. May she continue as thus and enjoy good health forever more. 

How did it get so complicated? I am overwhelmed just reading this yet here I am the nurturer and main cook in our home and I somehow have to make meals that deal with all of these things...good meals that nourish my growing children and also don't take up too much time because we are also homeschooling...

Anyway, please pray for me. The stack of books is calling and I am about to crack them open and make a meal plan for the next three days. We are going to start working through these books and attempt to find staples to sustain us.

The books I bought (from thrift books) are:

1. Nourishing Meals by Alissa Segersten
2. An Allergy Mom's Lifesaving Instant Pot Cookbook by Megan Lavin
3. Allergy-Free and Easy Cooking by Cybele Pascal
4. 150 Allergy-Free Recipes for Everyday and Entertaining; Pure Delicious by Heather Christo 

I'll let you know which one we like the best.

We have been gluten, dairy and egg free before in 2016 and 2017. We can do this again. It's hard, it is expensive and it's a lot of work but I know I can get in the groove and we can thrive. I just need to get there. We are no where near yet...

Here is to next week and new trends and...I'm about to drop like $200 on gluten free flours and rice noodles. 

I just want to know...does it get better? 

I hope it gets better.

Also isn't this coat (found at goodwill for $2.99 with the matching hat) for Esther adorable? She is obsessed and so am I. 

Pumpkin Patching

We had a great few days so today I decided to run errands after school was over. 

actual photograph of how we did school today, snuggled 
under heating blankets with half-eaten breakfast

The school day dragged on, Friday is always hard. It's still a school day but its almost the weekend. Mommy is tired. Everyone is tired. But here we are still showing up! We didn't start until 9 which is unusual for us but I needed a quiet morning to decompress.

And by decompress, I mean from my life choices, which I love. But I digress.

Anyway, I made the kids bagels and myself bean and rice tacos with guacamole. It was perfection, only broken up by a few tantrums because we are all still human. 

After school, everyone was excited to go out! We ran to Taproots first and bought lip balm and a few other necessities, like lotion. Every fall I buy new lotion and lip balm because it really only lasts a year and I only seem to need it in fall/winter, when the dry cold weather comes. Also, we always loose the lip balm by Christmas and I have to buy more. Good thing it's only a few dollars? Oh, and I always like to buy a different lotion scent. This time I bought a vanilla one and it smells awesome and will live by the front door for everyone to use. 

I would like to point out everyone gets their own lip balm, but we all share the same lotion. For some reason this is a very important clarification. 

Everyone was pretty well behaved at this point but I was already tired of getting my toddler in and out of the car. Why is this so hard? She's barely three feet but for some reason it's like wrangling a feral octopus every time I try to go into the store. And it's sometimes a fight to get her to hold my hand. And usually I open the door to find her shoes and socks off and...well, every mom has probably done that treasure hunt. It's just a lot, and I wanted to go home at this point but everyone was excited about our next location...which was Hobby Lobby. 

Hobby Lobby is where it all fell apart, which is perfect when you are learning about entropy in your homeschool, or about God's everlasting grace, but also hard because I'm Tired, Forty Years Old (in January) and So Over It. Anyway, my three year old is completely feral. She doesn't know how to behave in public and I'm trying to teach her but I think I'm a bad teacher, or something. Perhaps we don't go out enough. Anyway, we were at Hobby Lobby. The kids really wanted these alcohol markers for coloring and Hobby Lobby had the best price. They had good packs of markers for $12.99 each and I got one for each kid. 

Esther asked every three feet if she could have something, whining and crying when I said no, carrying things around when I asked her to put it down...I was about to lose my mind. I think when she acted up maybe I should have just left? But that would have been no fun for my big kids. Everyone picked out a new cute coloring book after the markers. Esther wanted to run here and there and touch everything and ask loud questions about passersbys "What's wrong with that lady? Why is she so short? I'm hungry! I want a TOY" In true feral passion.

She is the best main character in her own story and she definitely wants to be the main event in a lot of other peoples stories too...

At the check out there was an elderly lady with a little poodle dog and Esther and Becky were obsessed. They wanted to pet the dog then they wanted to pick up all the candy and ask if they could have that and I was trying to pay and leave and it was just chaos. I'm sure the poor teenage cashier will never want to have kids, if she was paying attention. She seemed to be doing her best to disassociate from her entire job experience the whole time I was there; but who am I to judge. Working retail isn't the most fun...I remember.

Our third event of the evening was to get Reuben a Halloween costume. We went to the mall to visit Spirit Halloween but couldn't find it anywhere. It turns out it was over near Liberty University and we were in the entirely wrong place, but I didn't find that out until after dinner. Anyway, we couldn't find it and thus Reuben did not get a costume, which is fine but he was disappointed. We will continue looking tomorrow. 

We did get pretzels, which was nice. I got one for each kid after looking up if they had eggs in them to find out if Becky could eat them. It said they did not have eggs in them, but it still gave her bloating issues and a stomachache so I"m not sure what is up... I mean, it's junk food...

silly Reuben

Our fourth and final adventure was to the ratchet pumpkin patch on the way home. We drive by this tent-and pumpkin selling market/fun house thing whenever we head to piano and the kids are always begging to go. Reuben did go once with daddy when he was two, but I just haven't made it out with Becky or Esther who want their turn. Not that Reuben remembers being there at two... anyway, today was the day. I promised we would make it this year before they closed after Halloween and I'm thrilled to say I kept my word.  

The kids had fun and I enjoyed getting a little bit of sunshine. This place was a little bit sketchy but seriously fun and everyone had a great time playing on all the blow up rides that looked like they should have been retired last year...and were literally, in some places, being held together with duct tape.

And at that point I was utterly done. I loaded up my overly aired children and took everyone home to watch a movie while I puttered around the house and continued to contemplate my existence. 

So, here we are. We all survived and life is beautiful. I've put myself to bed with a pack of free2b sunbutter cups (hey these things are delicious and made in a dedicated dairy free facility) and next I think I'll read a book. The last two books I tried to read bombed spectacularly. Lady Anna was horribly boring--seriously could have been shorter. Which is sad because I adore Trollope but I guess not everything is going to be five stars...I also tried The Pemberley Chronicles and it is the worst writing I have encountered in a long time. It's like watching characters move from above. There is no feeling or dialog in the book. I gave up after making myself read a few chapters. It's really awful. How does this book have so many good reviews? I could not stand it!

Obviously if you have any book recommendations, pass them on? I need a new read.

Alas, the chocolate is gone and I need to brush my teeth and do some cleaning rounds before I head to bed. Tomorrow is an unusually busy day...Reuben and I get to try something new! 

I'm pulling the plug.

In March of this year is when I found out I had alpha gal (I'd had it for years and it had been getting worse and worse and I had finally figured it out) we went on two separate diets in our house. A month after I found out about alpha gal, I figured out Becky had it. Then a few weeks later I started miscarrying our 11th baby--my 8th miscarriage--which went on for over two months as I continued to stop and start bleeding. Becky's alpha gal is now in remission, thank goodness! Mine is not. Doing the diet helped me to discover that Becky had an egg allergy. She had been having stomach pain on and off before the alpha gal diagnosis (and certainly alpha gal was part of it) but after going on the homeopathy for 30 days she was able to eat meat and have dairy again without issue. Becky is also allergic to chicken, turkey and turkey eggs, and quite possibly all bird and bird products. I think this is because we kept feeding her eggs for so long without realizing that eggs were the problem. Ugh, mom guilt! Poor Becky. But I'm so glad we have now figured it out!

I finally sat down yesterday (in an exhausted heap) and decided that we are all going on the same diet with a few variations. I can't keep trying to make two meals or stagger leftovers, it's driving me crazy. I need to have brain space for homeschooling and I'm so tired of not knowing what is for dinner or lunch or breakfast...breakfast has been a hot mess for awhile.

We are all going to go gluten free. And everything we make will be dairy free. I will keep raw milk around for the kids to drink so that we have a source of calcium, but we won't cook with it. We will all be egg free and if we can manage this then all I will have to do is make chicken and beef when needed and beans on the side. (Brian and Reuben are allergic to beans) We desperately need a diet in our home that everyone can eat. 

I went on thrift books and ordered 4 "top 8 free" allergy friendly cookbooks and I can't wait to get them. I told the kids we are going to take these cookbooks and systematically go through them and find some meals we like and take the guesswork out of meal time. Yes, it's going to be hard. We have a lot of gluten things in our home that we will give to a friend as we transition. But we are going to do this and learn how to nourish each other and thrive. We will make ONE meal for everyone! 

A journey has to start somewhere, doesn't it? I have been gluten and egg free before, but only when I was either by myself and/or with small toddlers, not homeschooling. I'm glad I have a big 11 year old to help me who loves baking, and an inquisitive 8 year old who enjoys chopping and a toddler who just loves mixing things in a big bowl. 

I didn't want to do this--I don't want to make my kids who can tolerate gluten be gluten free or everyone be egg free just for Becky-- but there are just too many allergies to manage, so we are going to try consolidating everyone. And if it doesn't work better than what we are doing now we can always go back. 

I had a very relaxed morning today with my devotions and soup for breakfast. God is so good and I am trying to trust in him through all these crazy times...as we miss our Pastor who passed away in September and I just found out another friend is having a still birth, which is devastating. There is so much sorrow in the world.  Through it all God is there, guiding us home.