A Week Without Gluten and Busyness

I didn't keep up very well with what we did last week.  We went out to town three times last week, and I was very busy.  We read our daily chapter from Proverbs and finished Mark's.  Jade wrote a paragraph nearly every day, from various sources.  He practiced some addition two, maybe three, different days, from a workbook.  We did a reading lesson or two.  We went for our walks, though we didn't go a couple different days.  I have no pictures of anything last week.   Some Youtube videos the boys watched were:

Animal Planet's Most Extreme:

Killer cats (after my talking about having seen a countdown a few years ago that said house cats were the top killers in the world, killing for mere pleasure, because I tell the boys often that I like cats, except I hate how they love to kill, and they kill the creatures I like to watch and hear)

Bees

Aura Imaging (which I am saving to watch myself, because I have a high interest in various camera imaging, seeing things with other types of visual equipment, other than that with which our human eyes are equipped)

Honoring One's Parents:

Appreciating your parents
my favorite

Respect your parents

Life Lessons: Parents

On the first day of last week, the boys and I took our neighbor Brenda grocery shopping, because her car broke down, and Nathan looked into getting it fixed for her.  Even if it had been running, though, she would not have been able to get out with her car, for she has to cross a creek in three places, one of which is really bad.  When we got home, the boys played most of the day in the lake in our yard, while I played with Liv, read, and talked to my friend Lindsey. 

The third day of the week, we cut out wheat and gluten, except Trusten had a bit of what was left of the homemade bread I'd made the day or two before.  I didn't get to him in time.  Nathan did not participate, though he had to participate somewhat at dinner.  I ground rice for flour, instead of wheat.  we went an entire seven days (Trust went seven days, too, as he went an extra day beyond Jaden and me), and we noticed nothing.  Even after we re-introduced it into our diets, nothing bad happened.  I'm glad, because I looked to see how much rice cost in bulk compared to wheat, and it is much more expensive.  For example, Bulkfoods.com charges a little less than $38 for 25 lbs. of wheat berries and a little more than $61 for 25 lbs. of brown rice.  Quinoa was 90-somehing dollars for 25 lbs.  We had some quinoa noodles as part of our lunch on two different days, though, and they were delicious.  I read the box to the boys, which told how the vast Inca empire lived on quinoa, and quinoa is much more nutritious than wheat, rice, corn, etc.  There were a couple charts, which were very impressive.  So delicious, too.  If we did have to cut out wheat and all gluten, I discovered that it wouldn't be nearly as bad as I thought.  The rice muffins we had for breakfast were tasty.  I tried making tortillas, and though I have trouble getting my wheat tortillas to roll up as a burrito or fajita, the rice tortillas were impossible.  I couldn't even get them big enough as I rolled the dough on the counter.  Ha!  So, I made small pancake sized circles with the hands, and we just put our chicken, peppers, and tomato (fully-cooked tomatoes from a can, as I can't do raw ones) fajita mixture onto those and ate with a fork.  They were very delicious-tasting, at least. 

I got two definite confirmations that Trusten is absolutely intolerance to casein, the protein in cow's milk.  I'd started out buying this rice cheese for him.  Well, I thought it was dairy free.  He had stopped asking for cheese and said he didn't like that.  Well, he started asking for sliced of that cheese.  On the third day, after noticing that he'd been terrible for the previous two days and on that day, when he asked for cheese, I thought, "Something's not right.  He is acting addicted to this cheese, just as he did dairy cheese, and his behavior has been awful."  So, I take the package of cheese and read the ingredients.  Casein!!!!  It was only lactose-free.  When I'd skimmed the ingredients at the store, I was looking for other things, assuming it was totally dairy-free.  Since no one else was going to eat that cheese, I tossed it all out for the critters, without giving Trusten any.  He had a terrible tantrum.  His breath returned, too.  It took him two days to line out.

Then another day, he saw that there was a honey candy in the top basket of my chicken baskets that hang over our kitchen sink.  I took it down and said that it had been up there for a long time, probably had melted and hardened several times in the sun and wouldn't be good to eat, and besides it could have dairy.  Then I did something that was just downright foolish.  I knew it when I did it, and yet I did it anyway.  I always pay the price when I pull such a stunt.  I threw the candy in the trash in front of him.  Stupid, stupid, stupid!  Sure enough, later we were all outside, and he went in.  After he was gone for a minute and thought he should be back if he'd just gone to the bathroom or went to retrieve something, I thought I'd better go check on him.  I walked in the door to see him standing at the trash can eating.  Oh, no!  He saw me approaching him, knew he was in trouble, and started running!  The rest of the day he was a mess...behavior-wise.  I later asked Nathan whether that candy would have had any dairy, and he said, "Butter."  Well, butter is mostly fat, and so has only a faint trace of casein, and yet that made him all-out crazy for 2.5 half days, and his breath was wretched, a stench of sewer again.  The next day or perhaps two days later, I got the idea of giving him some digestive enyzmes I have in the cabinet.  I broke open the capsule and gave it to him with a spoonful of honey.  I'm not sure whether it contained the enzyme that breaks down casein, nor whether it helped speed his recovery.

But, he was about back to normal breath- and behavior-wise after 2.5 days.  I'll do everything I possibly can to make sure he never takes in any casein.  That poor baby.  He stinks and is a nightmare to take care of when he has that in his body, because that enzyme that is needed is destroyed, but he can't help it.  It's so hard to be patient and nice when he has the horrible tantrums he has had.  I've stayed so tired and beat for the past few years.  And yet the poor baby isn't normally that bad.  He has a spirited personality, anyway, but the casein drives him to be a crazed lunatic.  No more!!!!!!! 

This is it for this post.  The next post will discuss Pentecost, Trusten's 3rd birthday, and other interesting things.