Elimination Diet Day 4 – On the Fly

The Geek read my posts from yesterday, and so this morning, he let me sleep in.  Until 1:00 P.M., y’all!

Sometimes that man knows me better than I know myself, because my mood is decidedly more upbeat today than it was yesterday.  Exhaustion can drain you of everything, even good spirits.

Granted, I won’t get as much done today as usual because if I’m smart – which I often aspire to be – I’ll try to get to bed at a reasonable hour.  Nine or ten hours in a day doesn’t give you time to accomplish much.

However, when I woke up, I saw that the Geek had cooked more of our potato pancake breakfast patties and had even made some for me.  So breakfast was still ‘diet worthy’.

When I was up and going, the Geek went to try and take a nap, and I proceeded to try to come up with a lunch for Mr. Charm.

This was tricky business…we only have roast, and I wanted to use the leftover roast for dinner tonight.  We were out of ground beef, and that left not a lot of options for me.

I took the cream off the top of a can of coconut milk and whipped it until it was fluffy.  Then I washed some blueberries and added them to the cream.

He LOVED the cream.

The blueberries?  Not so much.  He ate one bite, but after that would suck off the cream and spit the blueberries back out.

So I tried to ‘blend’ the cream and berries together in my food processor, but that didn’t work very well.

The Geek woke up because Mr. Charm had opened the bedroom door and the noise was making it hard to sleep, so he came out and held Mr. Happy and offered suggestions.

I added some honey to the blueberry/cream mix.  The Geek liked it better, but Mr. Charm wouldn’t even try it.

I tried cantaloupe with cream on top.  Nope.  No go.

I put the two glasses of fruit with cream together in the blender and tried to mix them up.  Our blender is a poor excuse for a blender, and it really didn’t blend all that well.  Mr. Charm took a few big sucks through a straw, but then a chunk of something got stuck in it and he wouldn’t try it again.

Eventually, we gave up for today when the Geek saw the potatos I had sliced up for fries in the fridge.  French fries again!

We discussed buying a new blender, but the one I want is a Vita-Mix, and those are ex-pen-sive.  Right now, we’d like to hold off on pricey purchases.  Next time we try smoothies, I’ll put everything in a glass pitcher and get out the immersion blender.  It will probably do a better job!

Then I got ready to go, because with the Geek home watching the painters, I needed to head to the grocery store.  I took Mr. Happy with me to avoid the fumes, and Mr. Charm and the Geek  stayed home and, from all reports, had a pleasant afternoon together.

Mr. Happy and I headed off to the health food co-op  with two shopping bags of returns.  I had purchased a ton of gluten-free flours, mixes and snacks after the initial hospital release that were no longer items on our menu.  In all likelihood, they will be back on our diet someday.  But right now, I can get my money back on them, and I’d hate to leave them cluttering up my kitchen for who knows how long, trial them, and find they don’t work, and then have to just throw them away.

It took a while at the counter, and while the employees of the Co-op are usually of the ‘bend-over-backwards’ mentality, today I must have hit at a bad time.  The woman taking the returns made it very clear that this was a huge imposition for her, and after doing the passive-aggressive route for a while, which was making me edgy, she finally looked me in the face and said “For future reference, you need to break up your returns into smaller parcels.  This is taking a lot of time.”

Now, I’d already explained to her that my son has a rare food protein allergy that we only discovered after a week in the hospital, because they want to know why you’re returning things.

So hot on the heels of hearing that I’m dealing with a chronically ill ten week old baby – a baby who was conveniently strapped to my body at the time for full visual cuteness – she gives me grief about ‘inconveniencing’ her with too many returns.

Without warning, and much to my own surprise, I started crying.

She wasn’t terribly rude about it; in fact, she was very professional in her statement (once she got bold enough to make a statement – the passive-aggressive stuff doesn’t count).  The fact remains, though, that I was returning the food to the store because it is poison for my baby AND she knew that and she still chose to put the focus on how time consuming this was for her.  It brought out those feelings from yesterday: I’m isolated, people don’t understand, people don’t care, people think you’re crazy.

Suddenly it was “Ma’am?  Are you okay?”

“I’m fine.  It’s just that I’m dealing with a lot right now and any extra grief just is too much.  Sorry.” I said.

Much more contrite, she now said “I’m sorry if I’m making this harder for you.”  Which would have been lovely – if she’d left it at that.  But, no, she continued on with “I was just telling you, you know, for future reference.”

Ugh!  I blew it off after that, waited quietly, and got my money back.  Then we went shopping to spend it all again.

This is an interesting diet to be on, in terms of shopping.  The bottom of my cart was laid out with eight 5-pound potato bags.  Two bags of onions, five cantaloupes, three honeydew melons, three watermelons (they were little), etc.  I bought large quantities, but little variety.  It was weird.

I decided to swing by their (very small) meat section to pick up just a little bit of beef to give some variety to my meals until our cow comes in.  Boy, am I glad we’re getting a whole cow!  Steaks were $16/pound!  Ground beef was better – $5.35 per pound.  We were paying $4 and up at the regular grocery store for corn and soy-laden, citric-acid sprayed, feed-lot beef, so really, it wasn’t that much higher.  I got 6 pounds of ground beef so I can have hamburgers for lunch this week with Mr. Charm and left the rest alone.  We’ll finish up the roasts.

Then it was off to the checkout lane, and a reminder of what the usual co-op employee mentality is like.  The checker was friendly and nice, the other checker helped sack groceries when she didn’t have customers, and then, when it was clear my food wouldn’t fit back into the cart in shopping bags, she went to get another cart and then helped me out to my car with the baskets.

She even loaded bags with me, and chastised me for trying to load bags myself, as I had Mr. Happy on my chest.  I reminded her that the whole point of wearing your baby is so you can continue to do things with an infant around, but thanked her very much for her time and trouble.

Turns out, she’s a nursing/midwife student, and she started asking me about my two boys and their deliveries, so we talked babies for a bit.  It was nice.  Very effective at getting me out of the funk the other woman put me in.  She’s a sweetie, and I can see being comfortable enough with her to trust her with delivering your children.

When we got home, I barely walked in the door when I said to the Geek “We’ve got a problem.”  The house stunk of paint fumes!  I started getting a headache the minute I smelled it. (I’ve been trying to avoid talking about it, because it’s just more stress and foolishness,  but we started remodeling our house shortly after Mr. Happy was born.  More fun stuff to deal with in an already stressful time!)

So I finished unloading the car while e Geek got Mr. Happy’s bottle ready, and then we made sure all the windows were open and put the box fan in one of the new master bedroom windows.  Then we all went and sat on the front porch for a bit.

While we were out there, Mr. Charm spotted the Geek’s step-dad out with the cows and stood up excitedly saying “PaPa!”  He took off down the steps and went to the fence, but didn’t see PaPa.  Suddenly he turned and headed towards the barn.  The Geek and I both shouted “NO!”, but it didn’t faze him one bit.

I ran across the yard to him and said “Mr. Charm, you don’t have any shoes on!  You have to have shoes on to go to the barn.  Come back inside and get your shoes, and then you can go see PaPa.”

He hesitated for a second, then turned and ran back into the house.

I’m telling you, this kid is going to be just like me.  I always needed an explanation for why I had to follow a rule, and it had to make sense to me or I would still disobey.  The shoes rule must make sense to Mr. Charm, because without it existing AND being logical, he would have ignored me and kept on running.  Wow.

So we got his shoes on and went to see PaPa.  He was feeding the cows in the big pasture, and Mr. Charm dragged me through the gate and into the big pasture to be with him.  The cows were right there.  Mr. Charm started to run up to them while screaming “COW!” and I yelled and ran after him.  It started a mini-stampede as the cows high-tailed it away from us!

When I caught him, and we stood still for a few minutes, the cows came meandering back.  Mr. Charm was beside himself with excitement!  He only ever gets to see the cows through the fences – having them right there was just WAY too cool!

So PaPa and I talked cows for a few minutes, and then he pointed to one and said “See that one right there with the horns?”  I looked, and asked him “Number 41?”

“Yeah,” he said. “That’s the one we’re takin’ down to the butcher for ya.”

Well, darn.  I have no problems with seeing the animal that I’m going to eat.  (I did when I first moved up here – city girl and all that.  I’m over it now.)  But did it have to be so cute?  It still had that gangly-legged, baby-face look to it!  If I had seen it in the field, I would have told Mr. Charm “Look at the baby!” even though I would have known that it was almost full-grown.  Bummer.

Of course, then Mr. Charm looked at the cows and shouted “EAT!” and I responded, “Yes, baby, we eat cows.”  and I was over it again.

Then Mr. Charm had to follow PaPa to the shop to get a bucket of feed for the cows in the small pasture.  He tried to carry the bucket, but it was too heavy, so PaPa had to walk slowly so Mr. Charm could hold onto the handle with him as they walked.

 

Then they got to the small pasture and Mr. Charm tried to climb the fence.  He made it up three rungs before I grabbed him, and then scrambled up ALL THE WAY TO THE TOP as I tried to get him off!  The little monkey even got a leg over the top rail and was throwing his body forward as I pulled him off.

For the record, I am SO not ready for him to be climbing fences yet.

We went back inside, and we couldn’t smell the paint fumes at all.  What a relief!  We don’t need a hotel room!

So for dinner I was scrambling a bit, again.

The Geek had chopped up some red bell peppers that were starting to look wrinkly and peeled some carrots while I was gone.  I got some olive oil and onions going in a pan, and sliced the carrots at an angle.  I threw about 3 carrots worth into the pan, and then cut up some carrots to put in the steamer for me.  Then I cut the bell peppers into bite sized pieces and threw them into the pan.  Added some chopped up garlic, some salt and pepper, and then got out the leftover roast.

I broke some of the roast into bite sized pieces and threw that into the pan as well.  Then I grabbed a handful of baby spinach leaves and tossed it in, stirred for about 30 seconds until wilted, and onto the plates it went.

For me, I heated up some more roast beef in the  microwave, added the steamed carrots, and that was my dinner.

I got back to the porch, where the Geek and Mr. Charm were already eating, and asked “How is it?”

The Geek looked up with wide eyes, and groaned “AWESOME.”  He’s always complimentary about my cooking (I usually am a pretty good cook) but it’s not often I get that strong a response!  Feels good, actually.  Especially when I did dinner ‘on-the-fly’, so to speak.

 

Mr. Charm picked out all the beef and ate it, but he did put a pepper in his mouth.  Then he spit it out.  Oh well. He tried it, I guess.

Then bathtime and bedtime, and now I’m getting ready to clean the kitchen and head to bed.

While we were eating, Mr. Happy vomited a little.  He choked and gagged a bit and looked scared.  Heartbreaking.  He did it again when I was giving him a spit bath on the changing table before bed.  Poor little guy…though, other than that he did really well today.  He was happy, napped better, and slept better last night, too.  I hope he gets some good sleep tonight.  Mr. Charm seemed to sleep better last night, too, so maybe it really was just ‘die-off’ upsetting him yesterday.  I hope he sleeps well again.

Not a lot of hours in today for me, but I did manage to get some things done.  And now I have groceries!  So tomorrow will be a long day in the kitchen prepping food.

Yup, today was a good day.