Turns out though, he’s also pretty smart.  He drags himself to CVS (because do not wake me up in the middle of the night and ask me to go buy Thera Flu…waking me up is for heart attacks, strokes, and ER Visits only), opens his arms wide, and scoops up a variety of cold and flu pills.  Nighttime, daytime, liquid, capsules, liquid capsules, powder you can turn into a liquid, etc.

Still unaccustomed to this habit, when I get sick I procrastinate until bed time and then go searching into the corners of the medicine cabinet for the possibility of a small green Nyquil pill that is left over from the time three years ago that I was sick.  Opened, unopened, expired, I don’t really care.

Except I can never find any because two years ago Ismael got sick and all he could come up with was expired products and claimed I was trying to kill him with past date analgesics.

No honey.  If I wanted to kill you, I would take a more direct route.  This is why Lorie gave me a cast iron frying pan for a wedding gift.  But as long as you keep me in cold products, you may not have much to worry about.

This post was written under the influence of two generic Nyquil pills which I dove into after casting aside the Corcidin HBP (doesn’t raise your blood presure. yay!  Doesn’t work at all.  Boo). I am not responsible for its contents and clearly am no longer fit to operate heavy machinery, or less so than I ever was.

Plus there’s a certain self satisfaction in the knowledge that “Yes, boy.  You WERE tired, and couldn’t you just listen to me from the beginning?”

What do you do when you come home from work in the morning?  I asked my husband who was reclining at table, on the Internet, kind of like the Roman Emperors of old.  The really wealthy ones with cable and Internet combo, of course.

I take rest.  So I don’t wake you up.

Rest, huh?  Is that how it works when you get home?

And I turned on my bitter heel and marched back into the kitchen.  After being upright and mobile for 12 hours my good humor is long gone…and yet dinner prep for these two other human beings, cleaning a dirty kitchen of my own doing, laundry for a child whom the daycare has now requested THREE changes of clothes a day, and other nightly duties lay ahead.

So suffice to say that when my son howled at the sight of his dinner, I was perfectly unamused.

I want someping else.  I waaaaaaaaaaaaantttt someeeepppinnnng else!  Waaah whine, etc.

What?

Crackers.

Um. No.

::insert additional whining until my brains were ready to leak out of my ears, nose, and throat all over my newly cleaned dining room table::

COME HERE.  Mommy worked hard to put this dinner together for you. I want you to sit down, shut up, and EAT IT.

Ok.

Ok?  Really? And without the whining or drama, he simply sat down and ate, like it was his idea all along and HEY!  This food is really kind of tasty mom!

It may not have been the kindest thing I said today but it was certainly the most effective.  I may have it copyrighted.

“I don’t want to see you with a book from the library,” said my dear husband to me over Christmas break.

What? Come again?

You.  You can’t return a book on time.  Get ebooks from the library.  When they’re due, they just take them back.

Like magic? And HEY, I told you when we got married that I was genetically incapable of returning books and movies on time.  It’s just who I am.

So, free books! And they take them away when you are done with them.  Ideal!!

Over break I read Wildly Affordable Organic: Eat Fabulous Food, Get Healthy, and Save the Planet–All on $5 a Day or Less by Linda Watson, Real Food: What to Eat and Why by Nina Planck, Fair Food: Growing a Healthy, Sustaingable Food System for All by Oran B. Hesterman, and 366 Delicious Ways to Cook Rice, Beans, and Grains by Andrea Chesman.  I also checked out the blog of Twinsanity who feeds organic food to her family of EIGHT on about $400 a month.

There was a lot that I valued in each of these books.  After reading Food Matters, 100 Days of Real Food, and watching Food, Inc. last summer, I made a lot of changes in our diet.  I found pleasantly last week that the changes resulted in a 20 pound weight loss for me, without even trying.

I won’t summarize each book, but will highlight the most important pieces.  Everyone has different ideas about food, but these might give you some food for thought.

1.  Eating organic isn’t that much more expensive.  You can find savings by buying in bulk, local, in season, and eating less meat.  Spending $1 locally has far more impact on improving the economy than spending that same $1 at a major corporation.  Some impoverished cities, like Detroit, do not even have a major grocery in their city limits and residents either buy their food at corner stores, liquor stores, or have to travel to the suburbs to buy food.

2.  Drink whole milk.  Your body needs the fat in order to make good use of proteins and vitamins in milk.

3.  Use solid fats, like butter, because they are most stable when heated.  Plus, HEY the French do it.  Throughout the 20th century, as use of vegetable oils increased, and use of butter and lard decreased, our 20th century health problems increased as well.  Olive oil is full of good fats.

4.  You should eat Omega 6 fats and Omega 3 fats in no more than a 4:1 ratio.  This, for me, was the most stunning information I read.   Too many Omega 6 in your diet results in an increase in all inflammatory diseases, most notably, cardiovascular disease, type 2 diabetes, metabolic syndrome, arthritis, cancer, and others.  The beef, chicken and eggs that I can purchase at the grocery have Omega 6 fats in excess of 20 to 1 of the Omega 3 fats.  Whereas grass fed beef is 3:1 and pastured eggs are 1.5:1.  This is the most significant change I can make to combat my high blood pressure and Ismael’s type 2 diabetes.

5.  Eating grassfed meat, chicken, eggs, is a little more expensive than the grocery store alternative, but it can be offset by eating more beans, grains, and vegetables during the week.  The book, 366 Delicious Ways to Cook Rice, Beans, and Grains, has been extremely helpful in that regard.  I made her recipe for stuffed cabbage tonight and while I only intermittently thought, “this would be SO GOOD WITH BEEF,” I have to say it was easy to put together, fast, tasty and I only burnt myself once.  That’s sufficient to become a regular in our household.

6. and of course…eat fish…eat whole grains.

7. And in our house, avoid pork for the husband, fish, soy, peanuts, tree nuts, coconut, and eggs for the boy.  Avoid a nervous breakdown for me.  Pass the wine please.  I heard red wine is good for me.  BONUS.

Rice Stuffed Cabbage in Sweet and Sour Sauce

From 366 Delicious Ways to Cook Rice, Beans, and Grains

Sauce

1 T olive oil

1 Small Diced Onion

4 Garlic Cloves

1 tsp grated ginger

1 28 oz can of Tomato Sauce

1 T honey

1 T lemon juice

Cabbage Rolls

8 large cabbage leaves

Olive Oil

4 garlic cloves

1 green pepper finely diced / I added a red pepper here too

Salt / Pepper

½ cup chopped scallions

2 cups cooked brown rice

1 tsp caraway seeds (I got a small amount of these for this recipe at Georgetown Market, for $.60)

To make sauce:  Heat oil add onion and garlic, sauté 3 minutes.  Add remaining sauce ingredients and simmer.

Blanch cabbage leaves in boiling water for 3 minutes.  Plunge in cold water to stop the cooking.

Filling:  heat oil in large skillet.  Add garlic, bell pepper, and scallions and sauté for 3 minutes.  Add rice.  Season with seeds and salt and pepper.

Heat oven to 350.  Coat dish with olive oil.  Stuff cabbage and loosely close each roll.  Place in baking dish. Pour remaining sauce over rolls and bake for 30 minutes.

Most children are allergic to only one food.  A very small percentage are allergic to two.  When you get to where a child is allergic to three or more, like yours, it’s really quite rare.  If you find that he reacts to something else, bring it in, we’ll mash it up and we’ll test him.  We can’t eliminate too many foods, or you won’t be able to feed him.

Six.  He’s allergic to six.

1. Peanuts
2. Tree nuts
3. Fish
4. Eggs
5. Coconut (which some say is tree nut, some say not)
6. and now… SOY.

How do you keep track of it all, asked my friend Danielle.

I just have to.

And so far, it seems, soy is the most problematic of all.

Soy is insidious.  It’s in everything.  Enchilada sauce?  check.  Pizza sauce?  check.  Take out pizza?  Never again will that cross our lips it seems. It’s not as easy to avoid as simply not eating tofu or not sprinkling his food with soy sauce.

It’s even in his beloved Triscuits, but thank goodness only in the form of soybean oil which is non allergenic.  If you want to see what Food Matters and Food Rules were talking about, then just try to find food that is in a package but doesn’t have corn or soy in it.  Then email me so I can buy it.

Last week, I walked out of the bread aisle at Wal Mart because every loaf had something he couldn’t eat.  Expensive, cheap, it didn’t matter. All of it contained an allergen.  I checked the bag of chocolate chips  that I bought back before the allergenic awareness carnival started and that we recently had been using as potty training bribes tokens of our affection.  “Contains soy.  Processed in a facility that process peanuts and tree nuts.”

The only solution, really, is to go back to cooking everything we eat from scratch like I did last summer. All that scratch cooking had gone to the wayside when school started.  I didn’t have time to make breakfast muffins or biscuits, baked bread, pizza crust, or tortillas and substituted the healthiest alternatives I could find.  Now we’re back to Little House on the Prairie, now with bread machines and indoor plumbing.

What I can see though is that for the first time in many months his face is clear, free of rash, and the black circles under his eyes (allergic shiners) are gone.  His nose isn’t running and his skin is smooth and free of all the itchy bumps.  His appetite is better.  I coaxed the pickiest child in the universe into eating a casserole that had yummy grain fed beef, carrots, tomatoes, onions, rice and CABBAGE in it last night.

I have to take my victories where they come these days and this week, cabbage is where it’s at.

I enjoyed reading and spreading my witty comments around Facebook this last weekend.  Seems that most of my friends have two ways to greet a new year:  1.  fondly or not so fondly saying goodbye to last year or 2. to challenge this next year to a fight

Tom said, “Bring it,” to which I asked “where? when?” and decided he must mean “a casserole or a beer.”  If you know Tom, then you know that free food and/or beer are always welcome.

Jealous, don’t you want to be my friend too?

So this year for me, well we are already off to an auspicious start, 2012 and me.

Where to begin?

1.  My three,  yes three, year old told me today in the McDonald’s drive thru “that these people in our way needed to move and they suck.”  Oh yes.  It could have been worse.  When asked why that big truck was blocking our way I censored myself before I could shout “because he is a selfish (redacted)”.  I called my mother who told me she, herself, was driving like an idiot asshole.

I think that by 2018 my kid is going to get kicked out of kindergarten for his ever expanding vocabulary.

2.  During the allergist appointment today my child first hid in the toy box in the examination room and then climbed into my lap, RIPPED HIS SHIRT OFF AND THREW IT ACROSS THE ROOM, and then bounced on my  knees like a cowboy.  A high, crazed, half naked cowboy.  No wonder I had to call the doctor back after I got home and ask him all the questions that fled from my mind at that very moment.  Probably from the sheer embarssment of being associated with me.

3.  Last night, my naked unable to get the hang of potty training son ran from the room.  .5 seconds later, he called out, “Moommmyyy. I pooped.”  I found him standing, bewildered in the bathroom, of course still naked, with a fresh pile of poop on the toilet seat. WHAT?  WHY?  Apparently he thought he could stand to poop as well as pee. No son. Just no.  Poop does not fly out of you like fire from a dragon’s mouth. I did not take pictures and you are so welcome.

4.  Tonight, same son, same potty training gig behaved so badly at bedtime that I just got up and walked out at which moment he had to pee RIGHT THEN and chose a stray, empty piece of tupperware that was in his room.  I opened his door after a few moments.  “Here mommy.” REALLY?

5.  And today’s allergy testing added soy to his long list of food allergies.

2012.  So far, you suck.  You better shape up.

I don’t want this present! I want a different present.

Cue incessent howling, kicking perfectly good Cars present across the room, time outs, and super time outs in his room.

I don’t want this present! I want a different present.

Plus one for persistence. Minus 5000 for manners.

Thank goodness the next gift that mom brought for my ungrateful, unnapped three year old was a hit.  Apparently he expected everything to be a dump truck and the next box was one.  Success!

On Christmas morning, I woke Adam and asked, “Do you want to come see if Santa brought you anything?”  Evidently, the word “Santa” can cut through the deepest sleep.

Merry Christmas…. there’s a lot of ‘struction going on around here.

Sorry, preschool projects.  Everything has glitter.

Glitter is the herpes of the craft world, she replied.

I love our babysitter.

When I am at the end of my rope with a willfull three year old who generally is going 1000 mph and refusing to behave, I’m going to pull up this post and look at this picture again and again.

Thank you preschool for reminding me how sweet my boy is.

Now I’m not sure why every medical provider asks this. What do they expect me to say?

You know, I find that if I just put down enough Chex Mix and water, he kind of looks after himself all day.  But if I don’t put enough down then Hooo-eeeeyyy… there is hell to pay.

I might try that sometime, but for now I stick with the truth.

He goes to preschool.

Ohhh, she says.  Is he enrolled in some speech therapy there?

I was a little offended.  I didn’t mean to be, and how could she know different since last time we were there he rolled on the floor pretending to be a spider and this time he hid behind me and acted the part of a deaf mute….who was partially trained in only Russian lip reading.

Um, no.  Actually he talks a lot.  I get whole stories in the car.

Fast foward 48 hours to the morning trip to preschool today:

Mommy…mommy…. Did you know that Batman breaks down the doors?  He just breaks down the doors and comes in and messes everything up.  He says ::insert something completely unintelligible here due to the karate movements from the car seat::  and he says it to THE CHID-REN and then?  Batman?  Batman has to sit in the peace chair.

You mean Batman?  Like BATMAN does this?  See all this time, I thought it was YOU messing up my house.

No, I'm the Batman. I've come to mess your house, eat your food, and sit in your peace chair.

No, Mommy.  It’s Batman.

****

Dear NP @ Indiana Clinic,

Please, in the future, can we have all follow up appointments in my car?

Thanks.