Apr 28 2014

Going gluten-free, and then some

Posted in Health

For the last two months, I’ve been on a gluten-free diet. This is the latest in a long line of attempts to reduce the amount of headaches and migraines which I experience. I originally went to a doctor to enquire whether there was possible connection (and treatment!) with hormone levels. He asked if I’d ever tried going on a gluten-free diet, and told me to try being gluten-free for three months. I came away from the appointment feeling excited – could it really be so simple?! – and disappointed – could it really be as simple, and difficult, as changing my diet?

Six years ago, when I was being tested for coeliac disease, I briefly explored the world of gluten-free living and it did not look promising. Nowadays, there is much more widespread awareness of coeliac disease and gluten intolerances. There are whole sections of supermarkets devoted to gluten-free products and I can even find gluten-free options on the menu in a country Victoria pub. The biggest surprise for me has been how many people have mentioned that they are on a gluten-free diet too, or they have a sister/brother/daughter/son/cousin/friend who is living gluten-free. Interestingly, everyone has been positive about it; I haven’t heard one person say “Oh yes. I tried that for a bit but it didn’t really work”. It has also amazed me the number of people I’ve encountered who have heard about it as a way of managing migraines. What rock have I been hiding under that I’d never heard of this?!

The change hasn’t been as difficult as I expected. I’ve already been going down the path of wholefood cooking anyway so it hasn’t been so much of a leap as a step sideways. In the early days of preparing food for Monsieur, I bought the book “Wholefood for Children” by Jude Blereau. It was a wonderful resource, providing information about the various ingredients as well as great recipes. I have since bought two more books by Jude Blereau and they have turned out to be a great resource for gluten-free cooking as well.

What has been difficult has been the loss of flexibility and convenience. At this stage, I am being very strict in avoiding gluten which means that I need to have plenty of my own food prepared. There are no days where I can just pick up something to eat somewhere along the way. I either have to pack enough food or plan to go somewhere that I know I can get gluten-free food. In day-to-day life, it’s not too big a deal, however when we had a short trip to Sydney before Easter, I had to take enough food for myself for the whole time we were away – the circumstances were such that my requirements couldn’t be catered for and we were not going to be able to go out and source our own food. My hope is that after this strict trial period, I will reach a point where I will be able to have the occasional meal and not worry about it.

The big question though is, is it working? I think, yes, it is. There has been a decrease in both the frequency and severity of headaches and migraines, and when I do have them, I can still think more clearly then normal. It has been a subtle shift, and I can understand why I need to trial it for three months. There has not been a moment of suddenly feeling much better, much more alert, much clearer in the head. Rather, it has crept up on me, hard to pinpoint and almost intangible. I am feeling better with this change and I am finding that the idea of eating gluten-containing food just does not appeal, not even cakes or biscuits which I usually love.

After Easter however, I am extending the trial period and the list of things to avoid. For the next three months as well as being gluten-free, I will also be going alcohol- and chocolate-free. Gulp. I have been noticing over the past year a tendency to get bad headaches or migraines after drinking sparkling wine, and more recently white wine has been a trigger too. Red wine was given up long ago, with regret. Living chocolate-free is going to be the real test. Over Easter I had a migraine that last for four days, followed by a headache that still lingers. It was hideous and frustrating; R had ten days off over the Easter and ANZAC Day weekends and I spent most of that time in pain, grumpy,and unable to fully enjoy all the things we wanted to to do together. Chocolate can be a migraine trigger and I do eat generous quantities of it; much more generous than when I originally tried eliminating it in my early 20’s, so clearly it’s time to check again if it could be a contributing factor. You can be sure that it will be the first item to be reintroduced at the end of the three months; I can cope with going gluten- and alcohol-free forever but chocolate-free? That’s a whole other story, one which I hope not to delve into.

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Feb 22 2014

Cooking with Toddlers

Posted in Monsieur Z,Snapshots

Cooking with a toddler really is just an exercise in embracing chaos. I tend to plunge in, enthusiastically and without much thought other than, “Do we have all the ingredients?” Sometimes it would be good to also ask myself, “Do we have enough of all the ingredients?”, but that’s a work in progress. Towards the end, as I survey the completely unrecognisable kitchen, I have a moment of wondering why on earth I thought this would be a good thing to do. Then I look at the smile on Monsieur’s face, the concentration as he licks the spoon and I realise that it is good that I jump right in, forgetting what the end result is because, really, when would I ever say to myself, “I want my kitchen to end up looking like this!”.

The smiles make it worthwhile

What happens to the topping when I turn my back

There are neat. individual mini-muffin holes under the mess

Just one part of the kitchen post-cooking with Monsieur

The end result, messy and yummy

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anatFebruary 27, 2014 - 4:09 pm

so wonderful and the muffins looks like floras……
great pictures.

goos on you zak and amber.

SueApril 25, 2014 - 5:25 pm

I think they look very yummy!

gypsyamberApril 28, 2014 - 4:40 pm

Thank you! They are chocolate beetroot muffins – a favourite 🙂 If you think they look like Flora’s muffins, then I’m very happy!

Feb 16 2014

Routines

Posted in Baby/Toddler Development,Monsieur Z,Social

The long, lazy summer is over and we are now back in the swing of things. All summer, Monsieur would ask “What day it is today?”* and upon receiving the reply he would continue, “so we go to?”. He loves his routines and was thrown a little by nothing being how it should be. He is very satisfied to have his weeks going according to schedule.

The weekly schedule is:

Monday: Skype chat with a friend, followed by a train video on YouTube – he can now quite accurately tell when we’ve had an hour to chat and will start asking to say goodbye and watch trains. After one, or two train videos we go to creative dance class and then Storytime at a local book store. Somewhere during the morning we will stop in for a coffee at our favourite coffee shop. I love Mondays! Such a great start to each new week.

Tuesday: Playgroup, which is full of fun activities, often followed by coffee with a couple of friends from playgroup. One of his playgroup friends is Japanese, and he will be learning Japanese at school from grade two so clearly he will be continuing the connection to Japan.

Wednesday: Grandma day!! We all have breakfast together – R, Monsieur and his grandparents. Monsieur quite confidently orders his own breakfast, which I share. After breakfast, Grandma and Monsieur go off together to his Shichida class – an early learning system based around right-brain learning. This term they are also trialling a new music class with a teacher who has come highly recommended by his Grandma’s choir instructor. Monsieur has lunch and his nap at Grandma’s place, and woe betide me should I arrive too early for pick-up and interrupt his post-nap reading time with Grandma. We often stop at the shops near Grandma’s house to pick up ingredients for dinner and we must always put coins in the “round-and-round thing” – his words! The round-and-round thing is a donation collection… thing, like a big bucket with a large funnel and a particular point to insert the coin so that it goes round and round and round and round the funnel section before dropping into the bottom bucket. We have discovered that five and ten cent coins work best, other coins are too heavy so they go to the bottom far too quickly. These are the little things that I never expected to notice or care about or study before having a child!

Thursday and Friday are schedule-less days. These are the days that we tend to arrange playdates, although I do want to go swimming each week, so Friday mornings may become pool mornings.

We have no afternoon commitments at all. Monsieur’s nap times vary which make it too hard to reliably get to anything or meet up with anyone. Also I want him to have a lot of free playtime and exploration time. Since moving back in, we have discovered the joy and ease of having almost-next-door-neighbours with a similar aged son. Our neighbours of three (or was it four?) years had Monsieur over at their house a couple of times while I moved boxes and did things in preparation for our move back. Sadly they moved, just as we were discovering just how amazing it could be to have another family so close, but happily their friends moved in who also have a son of a similar age to Monsieur. We do have some afternoon playdates/house swaps and, wow! It is amazing what a difference it makes having a family *right there* who we can catch up with, call upon to mind a child briefly or just chill out with on the hot days. Selfishly I want them to stay there forever!

On the weekends R and I take turns sleeping in. Whoever is not sleeping in will just play with Monsieur until the other wakes up. I like to think that these mornings make up for the weekday mornings when Monsieur will ask us to play with him as soon as he wakes up but we are too busy getting ready for the day to do so. Monsieur always likes to know what the plans are for the day, even if we just intend to clean and cook and wash. There is a book that I love to read to him, called “Today we have no plans” by Jane Godwin and Anna Walker, which celebrates the delight of a plan-free day after a busy week. Some weekends when Monsieur asks “so we go to?”, we will say “Today we have no plans. What would you like to do?”. I think that he is starting to love those days too.

 

* This is not an error on my part, this is how he asks the day.

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Feb 09 2014

In the words of a child

Posted in Baby/Toddler Development,Cognitive,Jottings,Linguistic,Monsieur Z

Two moments today which made us melt with The Cute:

This morning, whilst rubbing out a chalk drawing of a monster truck Monsieur said, “Monster truck is tired. It’s rubbing it’s lights”

This evening, at the end of bedtime. The current ritual is that Monsieur counts down from a chosen number to zero and we turn out the light, then the same process happens for the door being shut. Usually there’s a bit of bargaining as he is trying to make the count last longer and longer. Currently we’re at a count down from 15 to zero. The negotiation between R and Monsieur went like this:

R: 438

Z: *long pause* Ah….it’s too far from one and 10.

Can’t argue with that!

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Feb 09 2014

Sleep Training – A Year and a bit on

Posted in Early Parenthood,Sleep

I’ve been meaning to write this post for a while –  a check-in of how things are sleep-wise a year (and a bit) after all the sleep training.

The afternoon naps took quite a while to settle down. I remember that the nurses at Masada said that it could take up to five weeks, and I remember at the five week mark wondering when he was going to start having his afternoon nap reliably. It was a solid period of being very limited in our movements, really only going out over lunch time. After the initial buzz of energy, I also felt more tired than I expected, for longer than I expected. I think that it really took about 3 months of decent night sleeps before I recovered enough to feel like myself again. It was a gradual process, but it did happen. Fortunately the psychologist that I saw at Masada, and a couple of times subsequently, warned me that it would take a while, that I couldn’t expect myself to bounce back immediately.

Monsieur did eventually start having his afternoon naps, though the recommended two hours did not happen until he dropped his morning nap, sometime in February. Now, it feels like we’ve been on one big afternoon sleep a day for so long that I barely remember what it was like having to be home for two naps. He still naps in the afternoon, on average 2-3 hours, although he generally naps for just 90 minutes when he’s with his grandma. He goes down around 12:30, though this past week we had a couple of days where he didn’t get to bed until 1:30 and on those days he slept for three and a half hours. Incredible. The most amazing part of that though is that he is still ready to go to bed at 7pm, even if he only gets up from his nap at 5:15pm.

I can’t remember at what point he stopped waking before 6am – I think it was during last winter. But now it is unusual for him to wake before 6, and sometimes he’ll sleep as late as 7am!

He loves getting into bed, even if ten minutes earlier he has told me that he’s not tired. He snuggles under the doona with his cot friends and sometimes can’t get me out of the room quick enough. He loves to chat to his cot friends and sing for a while before going to sleep. Some nights, he can chatter away for an hour or so before falling asleep, but he is happy and never tries to get out of bed. I am so happy that the sleep training didn’t permanently take away his love of his bed.

He still wakes at night from time to time, generally he’ll wake three or four nights running, then stop again. He will ask “Mummy tap you” when he wants to go back to sleep and very commonly when he’s woken from a nightmare or from overheating. I love that the “tapping” technique I was taught at Masada has become a source of comfort for him. I suspect it will remain so for a long time to come. Every time I settle him with the tapping, as he calls it, I am grateful for the week at Masada.

I was also happy to discover that the weeks of sleeping in a completely blacked out room did not set him up to be unable to sleep in rooms with light. The transition back from a fully blacked out room happened gradually and naturally, as the tape attaching the cardboard to his windows slowly came away, letting more and more light in. I was worried with the transition to the in-laws house but thankfully never got around to blacking out Monsieur’s room there. Even with the blinds down, his room was quite light but it never seemed to give him any problems during his day nap. He was very sensitive to noise however, so we did spend a lot of the seven months living there walking around on tiptoes and speaking in whispers.

I did have one very fragile day where I was telling my pilates instructor about the house with floorboards and how quiet we had to be for Monsieur to be able to sleep. She commented that she had floorboards too and had no problems with her baby sleeping, and one of the other ladies in the group agreed and told me how they just went about their normal lives and the baby just learned to sleep through the noise. I just burst into tears and went to leave the class. My instructor convinced me to stay and was sorry but I think that it’s just too hard for anyone who has a baby who sleeps to understand the lengths you will go to in order to get your baby to go to sleep and stay asleep.

I never imagined that I would become *that* mother. Of course I’d heard about how you should do your vacuuming and have the washing machine going while your baby was asleep to get them used to the idea. Over the year and a half of sleep issues, I received so much well-intentioned advice on all the things that I should do. All the things that I could do which would make my baby sleep. Honestly, I have only really properly relaxed with his sleep since we moved back home post-renovation. Now that we are in a house where sound doesn’t travel, where I can close doors – plural! – between his room and me/the dishwasher/the washing machine/ the TV, where we are not in the middle of a busy inner city area, *now* I can relax while he sleeps and trust that he will keep sleeping.

It has been a long journey. In some ways, I still marvel at the concept of him sleeping and sleeping well, yet in other ways life has moved on and I started taking for granted again things which weren’t possible a year ago. Something which was highlighted after a dinner with friends in the city recently – they’d assumed that I’d driven, because I always did. I always wanted to have my car available so that I could get home as quickly as possible, if R called me, and to minimise travel time because there was only so much awake time in my evenings and I wanted that time to be with friends, not to be spent on trams. But for this dinner I’d hopped on a tram without a second thought. I just knew that Monsieur wouldn’t wake while I was out, and that if he did, R would totally be able to get him back to sleep and I knew that getting into bed later than 10pm wouldn’t completely wreck me for the next day. It is so nice to regain some normality and it will definitely help next time around to know that there is help available that doesn’t involve me sacrificing my relationship with my son (a true fear that I had about sleep training) and that there is and end to it. It doesn’t last forever and the world is so very bright when you and your child are getting sleep!

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