Is it all about the food??

As many of you know, Christian, Courtney, and I have been on strict diets for awhile. Courtney's and Christian's started in May and mine started a couple of months ago.

These diets have included no dairy, no eggs, no peanuts, no gluten, no yeast, no soy, and no citrus for the kids. I am off everything else except the citrus, but add black pepper and garlic.

Why have we done this?  For our health. But trust me, it hasn't been easy.

Last May, I decided that we should try to eat "healthier." I decided to start buying only 100% juice and switch out bread to "whole grain" breads without any high fructose corn syrup. I also wanted to not eat so much boxed food and try to eat the fruits and veggies more.

In a way, my plan backfired.  We were eating whole grain bread, but soon Courtney started to not feel well.  By the end of the week, she was sick as a dog!  I skipped my pediatrician (I will not get into that now!) and went to a new doctor that I had been seeing, she is a chiropractic physician and she seemed to be helping me with my issues, so I took Courtney in to see her.  She thought she had a food intolerance, which I would've never guessed, so we did an allergy test and all these things came up! I could hardly believe it!  Christian was also having some bowel trouble, so we put him on the same diet.

So began my life of not eating anything I used to eat and figuring out how to feed my children a whole new diet!

But I will say, it has helped tremendously!!  Courtney eats so much better now and she is not as picky. She does not curl up in a ball on the recliner after every meal. We always used to laugh at her too, whenever she would jump up and down, you could hear everything in her stomach jiggling. It would do this night and day. Guess what? It doesn't jiggle anymore! I asked the doctor yesterday what that was all about and she said that the jiggling was the inflammation in her stomach and now that it's not inflamed, it doesn't jiggle anymore!
Really, was she that affected by what she ate?? We are starting to get her back on foods now, but it is just amazing.

Why did I go on the diet? Many of you know that I have been dealing with anxiety for the last couple of years.  It was getting worse (along with a bunch of other symptoms) and I was going from doctor to doctor trying to get answers.  All they ever wanted me to do was go on anti-depressants.  None of them ever wanted to get to the source of my problem.

Then I found this chiropractic physician last March.  I called her up as a sort of "Let's see what she has to say."  I needed a different perspective and I really wanted to figure out what was going on.

The first thing she did was did an adrenal test and we found out that I had stage 3 adrenal fatigue. This means that my adrenal gland was burned out.  I was under so much stress that my adrenal gland gave up making cortisol.  This explained many of my symptoms!  So now what? We tried treating my adrenals, but as I was taking the supplements, I was getting worse!

I called the doctor back up and she looked over my test results again.  She determined that something inside my body was causing my adrenals stress.  She suggested to take a food allergy test.  This is about July or August now.  Her theory was that if I was eating something that my body didn't like, it was going to fight it.  This would therefore cause stress on my body and cause all my symptoms. I went ahead and did the test and  many things came up for me just like Courtney!

I have been off all this food for two months and it is like night and day difference to how I feel! I went back and saw my doctor yesterday and told her that I sleep so much better at night, my blood sugar is more stable and I am not taking naps in the afternoon anymore, plus I have more energy and my moods seem to be more stable.  I was amazed that I have improved so much in such a short amount of time!

I still deal with anxiety, but I know how to deal with it.  I also noticed that if I eat something I am not supposed to (like yesterday I had French Dressing which contains garlic), it will cause all my symptoms to come back again.  If I eat exactly what I should be and not drift away from the diet, I feel great!

So in the end, food can be our enemy or our friend. In my family, changing our diets has made a huge improvement.  Now that I have more energy, I am finding new meals to make and cooking is fun again.  We eat lots of fruits and vegetables and very little processed food. We can only eat out at buffet with a salad bar or we need to know exactly what is in our food. We ate at Qdoba the other day and I had some symptoms afterwards, maybe I should've asked for an ingredient list. :)

Anyway, life is good again. My adrenals are returning, anxiety is going down, I have well children, and it all boils down to what we are feeding our bodies.  Amazing!

Done with school!

For once,we finished up school in four days.

I kind of had an inspiration. The girls have a Halloween party tomorrow morning and I didn't want to do any school on Friday afternoon.

I don't think I have ever achieved this before, at least not this year.  It is a great feeling to not have to have school until Monday!

More grasshopper babies?

Courtney got up this morning to check on her grasshoppers and she saw more eggs in the terrarium!  I had taken the eggs from a couple of weeks and put them in a safe place, but now there are more!

How many times do grasshoppers lay eggs??

No Jury Duty!

About three weeks ago, I got a summons in the mail that I was being called for jury duty for the district court here in Omaha.  As much as I want to be on a jury, I didn't quite know how this was going to work.  As a stay-at-home mom, I could probably make it work to serve on a jury, but now that I homeschool, how would that work? If I got called in, my children could not go to school.  I was also going to be on call for a month, which added to the problem.

I filled out the forms and filled out the "Petition to get out of jury duty."  I wrote that I am a homeschool teacher and my children would not be able to go to school, I also added that I cannot hire a substitute.  In Nebraska, there is a state truancy law that says if your children miss more than 14 days of school, your name gets turned into the county attorney for review. I did not want this to happen! (remember, I could be on a jury for a month.)

I called in today to check my status and it said, "Your request to get out of jury duty has been granted!"

I was pretty happy!!

So to all you homeschool moms, if you get called into district court, you just might get out of it!

Oh Courtney!

Courtney never ceases to amaze me. Here's two of her latest stories:

1.  She has two pet grasshoppers that she just loves!  She checks on right before she goes to bed and right away in the morning, during the day she is always checking on them and seeing how they are doing. She talks to them and feeds them all the time. Today she said that one had his hand over his heart and she was reciting "The Plege of Allegiance" for him.

But yesterday morning, she made me laugh more than usual in regards to her pet grasshoppers.  She was eating some Berry Captain Crunch for breakfast and she knew that grasshoppers eat green things, so she was picking out the green berries to feed her grasshoppers.  She had a pile of them on the table. I don't think she ever fed them to them, but I think she was serious about it! I just laughed!

2. Today I went to go get the dirty laundry out of the girls' laundry basket and realized that only Megan had put her dirty clothes in there. Can you guess where Courtney's dirty clothes were? On her floor? No. Under her bed? No. Back in her drawer? (this has happened!)No. Stuffed in her closet? No. They are IN her bed. Along with her many blankets, penguins, pillow pets, barbie clothes, and many books. I only know this because I went to dig the library books out of her bed this morning and I saw one of her good Sunday dresses in a ball beside her pillow. I then proceeded to see outfits that I know she wore a couple of days ago in her bed too.

Do I make her be responsible and take her own dirty clothes out of her bed? (of course!) Or do I do it for her? (no way!)

I think I will not say anything and when she runs out of clothes, maybe she will learn that dirty clothes go in the laundry basket and not in her bed!!!

(Her dirty clothes are in her bed because she always changes while standing on her bed because then she can see herself in the mirror.)

Matt and I think she will definitely need some organization skills in the future!

This week...

1.  Christian took a 2 1/2 hour nap yesterday and as not happy about it! But after sleeping for 2 1/2 hours, he was in a much better mood! This is the boy who hasn't taken a nap in his bed in the afternoon for a couple of weeks. Honestly, it's so much easier to let him stay up and play with Courtney in the afternoon.

2.  I made banana bread for the first time yesterday with oatmeal flour. It got approval from my family!! It was really good.

3.  Today Megan starts a mini- dance camp with a different dance teacher who is working with her dance teacher. It is for the next three Tuesdays from 3-4 in the afternoon, I hope we can be done with school by 3 pm!

On top of dance class now, we still have piano lessons and gymnastics tonight.  I don't have one student coming tonight, so instead of piano lessons, we are going to go get family pictures done, thanks to a groupon I bought. :)  It expires on Halloween, so we need to get it done.  But before we have family pictures, I need to get Christian's hair cut an pick out clothes. Yikes!

4.  One of our friends has invited us to her homeschool coop's Halloween party on Friday. Do you know what that means? I need to get three kids fitted into Halloween costumes by then! Usually I tell them to just go to their closets about an hour before we go trick or treating and find something. I'm not sure I can do that this time. I need to sit down with them, look through their closets, and then maybe make a trip to Goodwill to see if I can find something cheap.   One of our friends said that Christian could borrow some train engineer overalls, so I think he is done. As you can tell, I don't try really hard on costumes. :) 

Ride the Tractor?

Today we are heading out to grandma's house for the annual harvest party.

As we were eating lunch today, I said to Christian,"You better eat your lunch if you want to go ride the tractor at grandma's house."

Here's how the rest of the conversation went:

Megan: You want to ride the tractor with Uncle Andrew, don't you?
Christian: No, with Uncle Shawn.
Me: Uncle Shawn is watching race cars today.
Christian: Race cars?
Me: Do you want to go watch race cars sometime?
Christian: Yah...(with a big grin!)
Me: If you want to ride in a tractor today, it will have to be with Uncle Andrew.
Christian: No, Uncle Shawn.
Me: No, Uncle Uncle Andrew
Christian: No, Uncle Shawn.
Me: What about Uncle Shane? You want to ride the tractor with him?
Christian: No, I ride combine with Uncle Shawn!