Friday, March 9, 2012

Strawberries, blueberries, apples, bananas, pineapple, cantaloupe, grapes, oranges....

It has been full week since Riley has tested positive for Celiac. A grocery list that once contained breads, bagels, pastas, cereals and flour for baking now only lists fruits, vegetables and meat.

It has only been a week, I know I have so much more to learn, I have barely scratched the surface. In this week, I have read non-stop, researched non-stop, spoken with every person in the health food store, joined discussion groups, read thousands of pages, spoken with farmers and relied heavily on my extremely educated and all around amazing friends. We are so blessed to have such special people in our lives, friends who are natruopaths, nutritionists, doctors and writing gluten free cookbooks. The hours I have logged on emails, chats, the phone and text messages is nuts. So much infact, that I received a message from Rogers today telling me we have hit our limit for Internet usage for this billing period.

It has been an interesting week, it started with tears and confusion. The emotions then moved to fear and overwhelming panic that I can't do this. I said to one of my dance mom friends that " I think we all may starve" and I meant it, at the time. I felt sorry for myself, I felt sorry for Riley. She will forever be the kid that can not participate in school lunches, she will be the kid bringing her own food to the birthday party, we will be the family that is difficult to have over for dinner.

Today, I am ready to rock this. We are a gluten free family. We have not eaten a single piece of gluten in 8 days and nobody has asked for it, not once.

Through all this it is glaringly obvious who passed the gluten free part of the 6th chromosome onto Riley, me. I have never felt better. The complete exhaustion is quickly dwindling, the black holes I had for eyes are fading and other issues that I would rather not put out there are getting better.

I will probably talk about this journey non-stop for a little while. I will be the first to admitt that I am obsessed right now. Completely obsessed with our bodies and the food we put it in. I am obsessed with reading about other peoples gluten free journeys and how it works in their family. I am fascinated by things like the Paleo Diet and gfree recipes.

Thank you. Thank you for all your support. Thank you for crying with me, thank you for jumping on my this sucks we are all going to die bandwagon for a few days and thank you for being the intelligent, thoughtful, caring, kind, understanding, empathic rock stars you are.

I was reading something the other day when the writer referred to her net, her group of friends that are always there to catch her when she is falling. My net was there in full force and I can not thank you enough.

1 comment:

P'nC said...

Amazing pics.....and you are inspirational. You've got this....and we'll all have something to learn from you!