The Food Journey Continues

Wow...I can't believe it's been nearly two months since I posted.  I'm such a slacker.  Now, in my defense, I was a tad busy helping Preacher Man plan a huge Easter event, in addition to my usual stay-at-home-mommy-Feingold-following-have-to-cook-everything-in-the-universe-from-scratch gig.  So anyway, here I am. 

I promised to keep you updated on the Free Spirit's diet progress, so here is a long overdue report.  We've been on the Feingold Diet for eight months now.  She has improved by about 50 percent, which is awesome, and I am grateful for that.  The thing that baffled me, though, was the fact that we couldn't seem to get any consistent results.  I heard story after story of how people's kids mellowed out on Feingold.  There was a definite "before" and "after".  The Free Spirit couldn't get more than three good days in a row (and that only happened once).  And lately, she's been almost back to her pre-Feingold behavior (as I type this, she's flailing through the hallway at church shooting off a foam rocket and singing nonsense songs.  Luckily, we're the only ones here--but if we weren't, she'd still be doing that.) 

Enter The Doctor.  After much prayer, we had decided to take her to an allergist.  The trouble was, we didn't know how to go about finding one who was sympathetic to the Feingold program.  Many doctors are unfamiliar with the program, and others simply do not believe it works.  We had neither time nor patience for such nonsense. 

Thankfully, the Feingold association has a list of doctors, and I began to research them, still praying fervently.  The name of a certain doctor came up everywhere I looked.  We decided he was the one.

Long story short, The Doctor gave Free Spirit a skin prick test and drew some blood (I'm sure you can imagine how that went.  Think ADHD child with no impulse control being approached by a person with a needle).  The skin prick test showed that she was allergic to...deep breath...eggs, milk, wheat, corn, cashews, potatoes, walnuts and tuna. 

I was speechless.  Honestly, I did not expect ANY results from that test, because I had heard that sensitivities don't show up on allergy tests and I thought that was what was going on.  I thought, well, we have to get that test out of the way, and then we can move on to the next one.   But no, we have full blown allergy here.  And that was just the skin test.  The blood test, which comes back in about four weeks, is testing for 96 other foods to see if she is allergic to any of those.  Oh joy.,

So now the question becomes...what do I feed her?  Feingold allows most of the foods she's allergic to.  Allergy diets sometimes allow dyes and preservatives.  At this point, it seems I will be doing some Feingold/Allergy hybrid that I work out myself.  I did order a recipe book that looks promising.  It's called Allergy Friendly Food, and it seems to combine the best of both worlds.  No dyes, no preservatives,  no eggs, milk, wheat, corn, etc., etc., etc.  It's possible the doctor will give us a diet tailor made for Free Spirit when we return to discuss the results of the blood test, but until then, I have to feed her something.

Again...I'll keep you posted.

Snack Art

When Free Spirit was a baby, she was sugar free.  For snacks, we gave her carrot wheels and told her they were cookies.

Then a sweet little lady in the church nursery introduced her to The Cookie...and the obsession began.

The problem was further compounded by a grandmother with a Hershey bar.  And another grandmother with exotic Australian candies.  We were outnumbered.  The Sweet Tooth was born.

If left to her own devices, the Free Spirit would consume nothing but junk.  Which is why she isn't left to her own devices.  I'm on a never ending quest to get more fruits, veggies and meat into her.  (The meat thing is somewhat frustrating.  She wants to be a vet and refuses to eat "her patients".)  So I just bought her this book called Snack Art.  She can play with her food, which will hopefully get her mind off ice cream.  She made this:

And this:

And she actually ate them.  I'm happy...she's happy.  We have had to substitute ingredients once or twice when they weren't Feingold friendly, but it wasn't too hard.  All in all, five bucks well spent.