Sweet Potato King

What. A. Week.

As I said last week, I came home from work on Tuesday full of energy and zest. Two hours later I was wiped out.

Then the kids and I all got hit with minor sniffles. I’m guessing environmental allergies is the culprit, as it’s all been runny noses and sneezes with no other symptoms.

Even mild allergies, though, make it hard for the kids to breathe at night, so we’ve had frequent wake-ups most nights from BOTH boys. Add to it the bizarre, nightmarish dreams I’ve been having all week and, well, I am still exhausted!

(Sorry, but cute alert here: both kiddos come up and ask for their noses to be wiped, which is adorable, but the way Jed does it just makes me giggle and melt at the same time. “Mommy, I have a “Bless You”!” he says. Because when he sneezes we say “God Bless You!” and then he usually needs his nose wiped. SO CUTE!)

On top of that, the last two weeks Darrel and I have had to do some serious marital work (more on that later; don’t fret – it’s good!), and I am stressed and just feeling about ten steps behind on everything.

Well, I guess that’s life. Sometimes you’re ahead of the game, and sometimes you’re playing catch-up.

On the plus side of things, Tuesday I stopped on the way home from Tulsa and ran some errands. One of them was to buy some organic sweet potatos from the health food co-op.

That night, I baked up some sweet potatos and served them to Zac.

Y’all, he ate A WHOLE SWEET POTATO in one sitting! Little boy just couldn’t get enough!

Then he slept – are you sitting down? – NINE HOURS STRAIGHT. 

Seriously.

That’s the longest he’s ever slept in one night before.

The next day he was just fine! No FPIES symptoms at all.

Only one problem: he refused to eat another bite of sweet potato!

This is one of those times that I hate FPIES. Is his food refusal because he can tell the food is no good for him? Or is he just expressing typical toddler pickiness? Is he just exerting control in one of the only ways he can?

Or maybe my kids think it’s fun to make Mommy crazy?

So Wednesday, unprepared for a sudden sweet potato refusal, we weren’t able to hide sweet potato in anything else and he didn’t eat any.

The next day, though, Mama was on a mission.

We’d decided that, due to a lack of any FPIES evidence at all, we were going to push through no matter what. 

So I pureed sweet potato and put it in his cookies.

He still didn’t like it. He didn’t eat an entire batch of cookies in one day like he usually does. But he ate enough to ingest a decent quantity of sweet potato.

Friday I still had cookies leftover for him, and this time, he ate them. All.

I also sliced some baked sweet potato and fried it in goat milk butter. He ate some of that, but not a lot.

Saturday I played the “hide it in cookies” trick again, and again, he didn’t eat as many as he usually does. But again, he ate enough.

By Sunday morning, there had been nary a reaction sign at all from him…if you don’t count the lack of interest in eating the sweet potatos!

So today is Day 2 of the 3 day break, and we’ll resume sweet potatos on Wednesday.

With any luck, by next Monday we’ll have our 11th safe food!

(And God Bless sweet potatos if they’re safe! I LOVE sweet potatos! The only reason I went with regular white potatos for the TED in the first place is the high reaction ranking sweet potatos have in the FPIES world. So I will be positively chowing down on sweet potatos, y’all!)

In other positive news, Jed successfully completed his entire first week of jobs on his chore chart, thereby earning the toy train he so desperately wanted.

I know. I’m still a little flummoxed, too.

Sadly, when we got to the store to buy his beloved “white train”, we learned it had been discontinued and they were all sold out. Uh-oh!

Fortunately, he found another train that thrilled him, so he left a happy, proud boy, with a happy, very proud Mama.

Since then, he’s not been as stellar, but it’s not really his fault. He was being shuffled back and forth between our house and my parent’s house, and we hadn’t really established how we would handle the job chart going between the two places. So there was inconsistency on the adults in that one.

With last week being such an exhausted, “Mommy is so tired she falls asleep every time she sits down” kind of week, I forgot to keep up with his jobs, too. More inconsistency. At barely 4, and new to the concept of defined responsibilities, he still needs reminding. Lacking that, he missed a few stars.

Still, we’re now at the start of the 3rd week and he’s only missed a handful of stars total. That’s very impressive to me!

We also started “laid-back pre-school” at home. Jed found a small workbook I’d bought a while back and expressed interest. So far he’s traced the first 4 letters of the alphabet and done some “find the like items” and “find the different item” worksheets, and he loved doing it!

I’m encouraged.

On one thing, though, I’d like to ask your advice. How do you deal with nightmares in your preschooler?

Friday night he kept waking up about every hour all night long, screaming at the top of his lungs. He would tighten his body up, clenched, scrunching his face, moaning, screaming, thrashing…for all the world, he looked like he was in physical pain.

I was so worried about him, I stayed awake to watch him sleep. His actions reminded me of his mesenteric lymphadenitis episode, and I was scared. Exhaustion finally overwhelmed me and I did fall asleep, but I slept fitfully.

The next day, I asked him how he felt and he said “I feel just fine!” He acted it, too. Later on, he told Darrel about “the ghostesses that chased me at night” and the “bad guys that scared me”, and Darrel finally figured out: he wasn’t sick or hurting…he was having really terrible nightmares all night!

Ugh!

I really don’t know what, if anything, can be done for this. I don’t know where his “ghost” and “bad guy” fixation came from, but I’m a little concerned. Any ideas? Insights?

I hate the idea of my little guy being afraid.

Thanks in advance for any advice!

How has your week been?