Nayanna Arts

is permeating the air of my house right now. It’s a special sort of smell and carries much more meaning than any ordinary loaf. You see, it’s Evelyne’s “special” bread. It’s hers alone. She gets to eat the whole thing all to herself and it usually doesn’t last 2 weeks. EVERY morning, either I or my husband, ask her “what do you want for breakfast honey” and 98% of the time, she replies “dé toas au beuue d’pinote avec da confituye” (yes, it’s phonetically typed in french) basically, toast with peanut butter and jam please!!! Every…. single…. morning… If for any reason, I fail to bake some bread in time and she HAS to miss a day of her favorite breakfast, she usually doesn’t eat that much, unless she can eat just about every fruit in the house The other 2%?? sometimes it’s cereal (which she lets soak too long in her milk and generally ends up eating only the bananas she’s asked enthusiastically to have added in them :P) and a very few times, some eggs. But still, this doesn’t explain why it’s HER special bread?? Well, that’s because she has Celiacs. For those of you just joining us, Evelyne was diagnosed at the end of summer 2006 with Celiacs Disease. It’s a form of wheat (and other grains) intolerance that somehow destroys her intestines and prevents her from absorbing various essential nutrients. Well, all of them in fact. She stopped growing when she was 15 months, just about, and at 22 months, when she finally underwent an upper GI endoscopy and then switched to a Gluten Free diet, she was 23 lbs at 22 months. At the end of that summer, she was just about 31-32 inches in height, which is the same height she was the previous spring. Her percentile (which normally doesn’t mean much as long as they follow their curve pretty steadily) fell from the 50-75%tile at birth and through her first 6 months of life, to UNDER the 25%tile for both height and weight between 18-20 months. At 3 and a half years, she is now a HEALTHY 6 inches above table height (I haven’t measured her since her birthday and she’s had a growth spurt in the last 3 months! YAY!!!) and is now hovering around 40 lbs!

Now, why rehash the past like this… yep, there’s more. That little voice of mine, the one that kept nagging me that maybe something is just not right with my little 13-15 month old back in 2006 is back… my littlest girl, Gabrielle, is showing VERY familiar signs. As DIFFERENT as both girls truly are and really, I think the only way they could be more different is if Gaby was a boy, seriously, their similarities end at their baby looks…. the similarities between their health at the same age is unsettling. Gabrielle has started spitting up again, which is something that had stopped entirely in the past 2 months. Her little belly is getting more and more prevalent, but it wasn’t always so. She’s loosing her baby fat faster than she should, even though she’s a walking fool. Her appetite for yummy things (hey! pizza!! Pasta??) is just not there. She’ll eat and eat and eat and stay seated for an hour if all I give her is fruit and bread, but nothing else?? I know these things can be considered normal for any average toddler “they aren’t interested in eating as much” “they walk so much it’s normal that they don’t put on much weight” “yada yada yada” Well, in 4 months, she’s put on 800g… that’s just 1.75 pounds. In FOUR months?? And dare I say it, she weighed in at 22 pounds just a month ago, and is now under 22 lbs…

In any event. All these thoughts from one little baked loaf of yummy smelling gluten free bread. I will be going through various information I have with me about the disease and various foods/brands I’ve check out and are gluten free for us. Why do I specify “for us”, because it largely depends on where your particular UPC coded product has been manufactured and packaged. It also depends how restrictive you are being with your diet. Since Evelyne is still too young to know the difference when she gets glutened, and who knows, as careful as we are, there’s still gluten in our home because we DO have to give Gabrielle some to see if she’ll develop the disease as well, she might still be getting glutened and we can’t really know. I’ll mostly share brand names with their numbers/websites you can check for yourself and maybe make a better yummier food-life for yourself. As it is, I’m using a “normal” cookbook for ALL our recipes! Believe it or not, I’m using one of Rachael Ray’s cookbooks and just substituting which ever ingredient is listed for an approved GF version. How does “Balsamic Chicken with Pesto gravy and arugula” sound to you? Well, I nixed the store bought pesto (and added more time to my recipe since this was originally a 15 minute meal) and just added basil to the girl’s portion of gravy, used verified balsamic vinegar (I’m WAY more careful than most, I call in EVERY product Evelyne eats if it’s not labeled as GF), substituted the AP flour with some AP brown rice flour and that’s it. Of course, kids being kids, I made them green cauliflower instead of the bitter green

I hope you follow this journey with us and if these snippets help even one person live their life better with this disease, then I’ll have done my part.

Cet article a été publié le Mardi, 11 mars 2008 à 19:34 et est classé sous Celiacs. Vous pouvez laisser un message, ou Trackback depuis votre propre site.