Day Too Many of the "Elemental Diet"

I truly never want to see turkey or rice again.

Yesterday, Day 4ish of 14, I decided that I wasn't going to eat again until the need to eat was greater than the desire to *not* eat turkey or rice. As a result, I had about 5 bites of rice yesterday afternoon. I also ate a couple of dried apricots, but I figured I've already gotten far enough into this diet that I'd hate to blow it and have to start over, so I closed the pack and put it away with a great feeling of self-sacrifice :-) It's not that I dislike turkey or rice, but it's pretty boring without any seasoning and my system is *not* liking it at all. I have a wierd taste in my mouth that I can't get rid of and my stomach has been rebelling at even the thought of any more rice and turkey.

Last night I headed over to the grocery store and had a talk with the deli people asking if there was *any* deli turkey that was just plain turkey - no added ingredients, preservatives, etc. I had to explain the diet I'm on and we finally decided that the all natural Boar's Head stuff fit the bill. One guy behind the counter remembered from a training session (who knew selling Boar's Head required training?) that it does contain raw sugar and sea salt, but I came to a decision. If I'm allergic to salt or sugar, I'm just going to have to live with it since you can't exactly live without those. And let me tell you, that turkey was pretty good.

So between the girls and I, we polished off a pound of that stuff between dinner last night and lunch today. I may survive a few more days yet.

Overheard this morning

L: "Uh! You make me crazy, K!"

I wonder where she learned such a phrase.

I am a desperate, desperate woman

Most of you have heard my whining and complaining about my allergies - the hives, the itching, the way it messes with my sleep schedule so that I fall asleep in the middle of the afternoon only to wake and discover my daughter has cut off all her hair...or painted her nails and half the table...or cut up a perfectly good pillowcase...or spilled orange paint on the kitchen floor...or snuck off to her room with half the snack box...you get the picture.

After yet another episode today of "Mystify the Allergist", we have a new plan of attack. It's called Stop Eating.

Ok, it's not quite that drastic, but it's close. For 2 weeks, I am allowed to have rice, turkey, and lamb. That's it. I'm not even allowed any seasoning, and he specifically pointed out that salt is a seasoning. After 2 weeks, if the hives have cleared up, then it's a food allergy and I can gradually start adding things back in to find the culprit. This means that in two weeks, I can add, say, corn back to my diet. If there's no reaction over the following 4-5 days, I can pick a different thing to add and so on until we find something.

Yep, this is sounding far too exciting for words. Of course, if the hives *don't* clear up on the Stop Eating diet, then we'll have to keep looking and he was not too encouraging about all that since we've looked at everything else already. His opinion was that then there wasn't too much we could do except just accept the fact that I just have hives and someday they might go away all by themselves or they might never go away. Nice.

The allergist did mention that they used to put people in the hospital to administer the Stop Eating diet to remove them from every environmental/life factor that could possibly be affecting them. Unfortunately, health insurance companies won't cover that these days. Gosh, I was thinking it'd be kinda nice to lie around all day with nothing to do, except that I'd be bored out of my noggin after a few hours.

I do need to find something to keep my hands busy, though. I'm finding it really frustrating to not be able to snack *at all*, since there's not much about lamb, turkey, and rice that makes a good snack. I do have to admit that it's very filling; we had ground turkey patties and rice for dinner and I'm still stuffed several hours later (I wonder if Tums count as a "food"). The doc mentioned that most people lose weight on this diet and they complain that it gets really, really old (geez, whuda thunk it?), but by the time he proposes it, patients are willing to do *anything* that might help.

Heck, you gotta be desperate to agree to eat lamb, turkey, or rice for breakfast. And lunch. And dinner. For 2 weeks. All I can say is that I'd better come out of this skinny! Oh, and I hope it gets rid of the hives, too.

"Pon-say"?

Where's The Complete Idiot's Guide to Ballet Vocabulary when you need it?

Yesterday afternoon after dance class #3, L came waltzing into the living room repeating something that sounded like "pon-say". She stood before me and seemed to bending at her knees while saying this strange-sounding word with a huge smile pasted across her face.

"What?" I asked her. So she repeated the word even louder, because obviously it makes more sense if you say it with more volume.

Curious as to what those teachers were actually teaching my daughter, I asked her to show me some other things they did in class. L's favorite is obviously the "beach ball" which is where you hold your arms out in front of you as if you were holding...a beach ball. And no, I didn't need the Ballet Vocabulary book to understand that one.

I did ask her about "fondue" and "ravioli" from the last class and she looked at me like I was crazy. I guess my hearing was affected by my growling stomach after all.

Infinitely gross, but a good lesson

At 3.5, L is still in the process of potty-training. She was extremely resistant to the whole idea until June, when we finally had an "ah-hah!" moment. Since then, it's been hit-or-miss with actually making it to the potty in time. She knows that she gets in trouble when she doesn't make it, especially when she's just said "no" to several queries of, "Do you need to go potty?". As a result, she's taken to quietly changing her panties after accidents and never saying a word.

A few days ago I was in L's room and noticed some papers crumpled up on the floor. With brown stuff smeared on them. Nice. Apparently, she had had an accident of major proportions and had tried to take care of it herself. Lacking any TP or wipes in her room, she had torn pages from her notebook and tried to use that. Lots of pages. With an appropriate amount of groaning, complaining, and snapping at L, I followed the trail to her closet where she had stuffed what looked like a whole notebook worth of brown-smeared paper. I made L bring me the trash can and as I continued to pull out more and more paper and found brown smeared all over the carpet and the tubs of off-season clothing, I got madder and madder. I finally just spanked her and sent her to bed in a fit of grossness-induced anger. If she had just *told me* when it happened instead of trying to hide it, it would have been a whole lot less trouble for me and her!

After a lot of scrubbing and Lysol, I got to thinking. I know why she did it, after all, she *hates* to get in trouble and she gets in trouble a lot because she just can't resist the urge to do what she knows is wrong.

Then the bigger picture emerged. There are many, many things that I do that are just as disgusting to God as that poop-smeared paper. I know they're wrong and so I try to hide them, stuffing them out of sight even though I know God's gonna find out. In fact, He doesn't have to "find out", He was watching the whole time and I *still* did it ('cause I'm just intelligent like that). Even when God comes and cleans up my mess, He doesn't get mad, spank me, and send me to bed. He gives me another chance.

I figure L will probably end up in therapy one day complaining that her mom told such a gross story to the whole wide internet, but it was such a lesson that I felt I needed to share it. Even if it does make me feel like I need to pull the Lysol back out and go over everything again "just to make sure".

Ready...Get Set...and...

It's amazing how many activities run from Labor Day to Memorial Day and we seem to have gotten involved in all of them. Ok, maybe not *all* of them, but enough to make this week seem crazy on paper.

Tuesday afternoon - soccer
Tuesday evening - MOPS

Wednesday morning - dance

Thursday morning - Community Bible Study
Thursday afternoon - Girl Scouts

Our pace is about to pick up and we still have school to fit in around it all. I know it'll flow a whole lot better than I fear, well, maybe all except Thursday. Thursdays we might have to do some evening school to get everything in, but at least it's only twice a month that we have Brownies thrown into the mix and MOPS is only once a month.

In anticipation of the busy season, I put a little extra effort into organization. I found a really cool site that sold a really nice folder with plastic pockets for storing info on all the various activities. Unfortunately, those really nice folders were a little on the expensive side, so I found my own version at Staples. I'll keep you posted on how it's working to keep Mommy organized and sane.

What a well-dressed woman wears to the fair

We went to the local Labor Day weekend festival today. We went early this morning and rode on the float sponsored by our adoption home study agency. Actually, L and I rode wit me trying to keep her seated, K walked beside/behind handing out candy (because we might have hurt someone by throwing the candy from the float, for goodness sakes), and W waited for us from the sidelines, ended up on the wrong side, and chased down the float so he could get some pictures. It was an active morning for all of us :-)

After the end, we walked back up to the arts and crafts until the whining from both girls threatened to turn the parents into raging infernos, so we took them home, fed them, and put them to bed for naps. K has been sick with a cold and who knows what was wrong with L. They both spent some quiet time in their rooms and came out much happier, so we went back for the crafts, games, and rides this evening.

L came out of her room dressed to the 9s to go back to the festival. She wore a bow, necklace, bracelet, ring, earrings, flower flip-flops, and carried a purse stocked with a compact wither her "pretend" make-up. She then won another necklace and even carried that purse around the whole time. What a girl!

Please also pray for K and her cold. It's really making her miserable and the poor girl is so rarely sick, it gets the best of her pretty easily.