We heart Banjo the Carob Bear xx

Little B is allergic to so many things that often he either has to miss out (a big no no when you are six) or magic mama has to try and re-create things as best she can. And I have to say this generally involves food and I work hard at making things from scratch (I make a mean fake freckle for a tea cup biscuit LOL).

But after only one term at school, this need to fit in has made itself even more apparent. Our school has no formal policies on birthdays and in an open prep classroom there are 48 birthdays to be had this year. Thankfully we really only have to experience 24 of them!! And experience them we have - they primarily revolved around a bag of chocolate frogs, chocolate biscuits and birthday cakes.

At kinder and now school, we have always had home-made cupcakes in the freezer at the office, so Little B gets to celebrate when things are brought in. But we have since discovered (sadly in retrospect) that this is too hard for the teachers to follow through with.

My next try was to present them with a jar for Little B containing small containers of bubbles, individual shortbread biscuits and plain white marshmallows (so he could pick one thing). Which was novel and exciting and seemed to be working.

But you can imagine delight when we recently discovered Banjo the Carob Bear. He is a little carob teddy bear (not unlike a branded chocolate frog). He tastes divine, is oh so very cute and Little B loves that he looks like he is eating the same thing as everyone else.

These have made their way into Little B's treaty jar at school and now he doesnt spend birthday time, sitting with nothing while the rest of the kids munch on. Plus I love that they are made by a small South Australian family business in Port Elliot (where my grandparents live).

** Disclaimer: I am in no way sponsored or affiliated with The Carob Kitchen. Just one very happy customer :-)

Cooking up a Storm

I’ve been spending lots of time experimenting in the kitchen over the last few weeks. I’ve discovered a couple of new vegetarian cookbooks (River Cottage Veg Everyday and The Global Vegetarian Kitchen – and no I’m not a River Cottage groupie LOL)

I’m trying to cook with a greater focus on seasonality especially where veg is concerned. Summer I find easy but with winter, I want to branch out from the normal stews and soups we make.

I made the most delicious Cauliflower Soup with Garlic Croutons last week, and this week hope to make a Chickpea and Cauliflower curry.

 

Also my other aim has been to move Little B away from just toast for breakfast. He was recently diagnosed with hypoglycaemia after fainting at kindy, so it’s low GI all the way. But this has been a bit tricky because he has so many allergies (rules out eggs, some kinds of dairy, nuts).

But some new ideas have been:

:: Buttermilk Pikelets with stewed pears

:: Home made Baked Beans on the obligatory toast

:: Frijoles Con Queso

:: A breakfast smoothie (using Quark instead of yoghurt) with a low gi muffin

I’m trying to get him into some sort of breakfast routine in preparation for school next year. This may seem odd but Little B likes to know exactly what breakfast is, whereas the rest of the day he’s a go with the flow and adapt kind of boy. But with breakfast he is shall we say rigid in his ideas!!

Fast Food Dilemma

The title says it all really. This week on his return to preschool, Little B was invited to a birthday party at local fast food restaurant and I have to say that this threw up a bit of a conundrum for me. Little B wouldnt have a clue what McD's is (no brand recognition here)...he's never been to one so it's never really been an issue for us. First and foremost, McD's food is full of rubbish so we dont contemplate it as a food source, but more importantly it is also chock full of soy (or contaminated with soy by cooking process). So it's never going to be high on our list of places to visit.

Secondly we've just finished participating in our local communities fight to stop said fast food restaurant being built in our local area. We live in an area known for its national parks and gardens and many of us objected to this application.

Anyways back to the problem at hand. How to handle the birthday invite? In the past my first inclination would have been to politely decline and skip the event all together. But nowadays Mr B and I really dont want to impinge on Little B's social life by prohibiting certain places or lifestyles. After all everyone's different and lives life differently...and if we hadnt lived with multiple food allergies for the last 5 years, who knows where we would be now?? (Mind you after seeing Super Size Me by Morgan Spurlock in 2004 I can pretty much assure you it wouldnt be at Maccas).

Mainly I really dont want his life to be defined or confined shall we say by his allergies. More importantly it's the first birthday party he's been invited to through preschool and outside our family group of friends.  We really feel that so much of his life is confined by his food choices and even more recently defined by his dcd (we now know that his shyness has been a result of his dcd). So what to do??

To cut a long story short, I spoke to the McD's franchise in question who assured me that there is nothing Little B can eat. And no we cant take anything onto the premises that we have made even though its only for 1 child. There flexibility knows no bounds - non? We explained this as best as we could to Little B who has chosen to attend the party to play with the kids and have his face painted. We will then have a cupcake on the way home in the car. Problem sorted, crisis averted.....for now.

So what would you do? Have you ever had a birthday invite that made you think twice?

Eggsellent!!

Photo found here

We have the best news at the House of B...Little B has outgrown his egg allergy. Woo hoo....party time!!!

He has passed his egg trials and is now happy eating eggs a few times a week. Considering he is 4 years and 8 months this seems a long time coming. And while we currently buy our eggs from a friend who doesnt feed her chooks soy grain, we have tried one bought egg and he didnt have a bad reaction.

His allergy list is still pretty long but it warms my heart to see how proud he is of being able to eat something new - it is the most proud addition to his lunchbox 1 day a week at kindy. Plus bonus for us is now it makes sense to get some little chookens - Mr B loves eggs as does Granny B and now Little B. 3 fantastic reasons to make our eggs home grown.

What was I thinking!?!?!?

Do you ever have those days where you end up saying "what was I thinking?". We had one of those days on Tuesday. Driving home late from a doctors appointment where we had to wait for over an hour beforehand, we decided to stop at a local pizza shop to grab some dinner.

We dont do this lightly with all the food allergies in the house but this local pizza place knows us and caters to our needs very well. So we got there and....it had changed hands. That should have been my red flag to get the hell out of there. But they assured me they were operating on the same principles as the previous owners and could help us and I had a cranky hungry 4.5 year old in tow.

So we ordered our super allergy friendly pizza for Little B and me (no dairy, pumpkin base etc) and one gluten free for Granny B & Mr B. Went home and ate our dinner - I felt pretty crummy not long after eating but everyone else was fine. Next day - everyone else was not fine. Hmmm we started thinking ok, there must have been gluten or tomato or dairy - it's a food reaction.

But as the day progressed, I would say Little B and my pizza was an allergy problem (we had usual allergy reactions and coped as best we could). Granny B & Mr B's pizza had serious food poisoning issues. Two days later, Little B and I are totally on the mend. I cant say the same for Granny B and Mr B - while not as sick as yesterday they are not much better either. 

But seriously what was were we thinking !?!?!?!

The Perils of Soy

I’ll be the first to say that we are not avid fans of soy. Primarily because Little B is allergic to soy and subsequently so am I. But as our journey of soy allergy has grown, my knowledge and shock at the perils of soy have grown. Both of us bleed internally from soy which is shocking in itself but I find it more shocking about where you find soy in food.

Have you every stopped to think what soy is in? The most obvious things probably come to mind – soy milk, tofu, soy products like yoghurt and ice cream. Soy is actually an insidious product…soy is quite literally in everything. Soy is in just about all breads, most processed foods, in nearly all chocolates, it can be in cow milk yoghurt, it can be in oils, its in pasta sauce, it contaminates most nut mixes (biodynamic or mainstream). But here’s where it gets tricky – soy is in all mainstream meats (its used heavily in grain feeds), it’s used in many organic meats (namely chicken, and pork).  But I was shocked to hear from two different dietitians recently that there are no longer any soy free chickens in Australia.

We used to think that Little B was allergic to eggs until we found out that if a chicken eats soy grain then its in their eggs. There are no retail soy free eggs in Australia (so unless you have your own chickens and feed them soy free grain, eggs are out). All farmed fish in Australia is fed soy meal (think salmon). Many canned fish contains soy contamination. Soy is also in many pelletized fertilisers which you then put onto your vegie garden or to feed your fruit trees.

It was originally invented for cardboard, but soy is now a filler that manufacturers fling into just about everything these days. Because it is cheap!!  Not nutritious, not beneficial….they key word here is because it is cheap!

Hmm with so much hidden soy in food how much is too much?? Nobody knows – the typical catch cry is but Asian cultures have eaten soy forever….but most studies have said that Asians traditionally consume about 1 serve of soy per day, but even if that was 3 times a day, what do people in Western cultures actually consume - directly and indirectly?? Lets say you drink 2 glasses of soy milk per day, but then you have some eggs on toast for breakfast, followed by a chicken sandwich for lunch and some chocolate or a yoghurt and maybe a lamb stew or a pasta for dinner – how many serves of soy is it now??

What about the effects of soy long term?? I was interested to find out that soy is a goitrogen which means it affects your thyroid . I have met 6 women in the past 9 months who all have thyroid problems that their doctors attribute to their intake of soy milk. Their thyroid problems have improved greatly from the removal of soy products from their diet.

Further reading and you see that soy is an endocrine disrupter much like BPA.  There is now rising infertility in the world as well as early puberty for females. Is this a case of too much soy, too much oestrogen, too early in life? Dr Mercola believes that children are at increased risk for prostate and breast cancer, early puberty, endometriosis and infertility, irregular and painful menstrual periods if they are given soy formula or soy milk.

Others like Retha Newbold, a developmental biologist at the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences believe feeding a child soy is never a good thing. Obviously it’s never been a good thing is this household but maybe its not a good thing in most households??

Hmmm I’m not one to judge but the more I find out about soy (especially my newest knowledge about soy in meat) has opened my eyes amazingly. I’m lucky that I then found a two small farmers who raise their lambs and beef biodynamically – they eat grass and only grass (with a few bits of seaweed thrown in). But how long before we are manufactured out of the food chain? How long before everything contains soy?

Oscar's Lunchbox

I came across the most fabulous book yesterday. Oscar's Lunchbox by Pam Houssenloge is a book written especially for children who have food allergies or intolerances (by a mum who has a child with food allergies and intolerances). Most books you find are targeted at kids with nut allergies and / or anaphylaxis, which doesn’t apply in our situation (not that you’d want a picture book about GI bleeding LOL). So it’s great to find a kids book that talks about different food intolerances specifically in easy fun terms (Little B is intolerant to salicylates which means most fruit and vegies).

Reading books to Little B is always hit when either he or we want him to understand something. I used On Your Potty, Little Rabbit by Kathleen Amant to help with toilet training and believe it’s one of the key things that worked for us. I also used Kathleen Amant's book about brushing teeth when Little B didnt like brushing his teeth. Repetition reading helps normalize things.

Little B is at the age where he really notices food differences and he feels left out or different because of his multiple food allergies and his food intolerances. So this book couldn’t come at  a more opportune time plus it talks a lot about treating your body like a race car and putting the right fuel in!! It really couldn't be more appealing for a 4 year old boy :-)

Food Challenge Update

Picture courtesy of http://www.mommiesoffoodallergicchildren.com

Well our current round of food challenges for Little B has been interesting.

Goats cheese - Yes

Cashew Nut Butter  - Yes

Eggs – the jury’s still out.

Yoghurt – Paris Creek Biodynamic Swiss Style - Yes

Yoghurt was a really interesting one for us. Little B has always reacted to yoghurt quite badly. The drawback has always been that he adores yoghurt. After reading Jude Blereau I started looking at the kinds of yoghurt you can buy in a different way. She believes that people react to the milk solids added to yoghurt not the yoghurt itself. So I went off to look for yoghurts without milk solids (no mean feat).

We tried two kinds – Marrook Farm and Paris Creek. And we hit jackpot with Paris Creek. Little B can eat this with no reaction whatsoever. So now we add it to his porridge in the mornings, sometimes as a snack with fruit and it’s a handy standyby when he is sick and doesn’t want to eat anything.

Goats cheese was another tricky one. He can eat it with no reaction. But if he eats it too often then we get a reaction, like a slow build up. But it’s handy to add to pasta once a week.

Eggs – the jury’s out for this one. He reacts but it is delayed and much smaller than it used to be. So we will hold off on eggs for the time being and try again at a later stage.

But this has still let us expand Little B’s diet and that is a good thing for both him and us. It’s nice to branch out and get a bit more creative in the kitchen LOL. Well creative for a house catering to a child with multiple food allergies.

I'm sorry to say...

We attended an orientation / trial session this morning at the only kindergarten that could offer us a place mid-year, and I’m sorry to say that it was a complete disaster.

While the teacher was very nice, she had trouble dealing with the concept of multiple chemical sensitivities. She wasn’t prepared to not wear perfume, nor stop any sensory activities that involved strong smelling substances, like shaving cream.

So I’m now home with a little boy who is covered in eczema, scratching his ears until they bleed, who is hyper, and has lost his language for the afternoon – just from our short time there today.

Oh well, onwards and upwards – we are just going to hope that the paint smell evaporates before the end of term at our old kindy and that we get some time to attend there. Until then it will just be playgroups, play dates with his kindy mates and lots of fun at home.

You win some, you lose some :-)

I am so annoyed....

I am so annoyed this evening. After picking Little B's kindy because of it's eco-credentials they have gone and done something really dumb. Over the school holidays they painted the entire inside of the kindy....in toxic high VOC paint.

Luckily, both the kindy teacher and assistant called me yesterday and today to warn me. As did another mother who had gone in yesterday to do some fundraising work. I went down this afternoon to check it out (read smell) for myself.

The smell knocks you over before you even walk through the door. Now with a child with multiple chemical sensitivities, this means that Little B will be unable to attend kindy for pretty much all of Term 3 :-(

So this afternoon has been a mad scramble to see if he can get in anywhere else for the term (no mean feat). We are off to view one kindy tomorrow in the vain hope it will be suitable. Otherwise, we will just join another playgroup, do some fun classes and play.

But tonight I feel victimised, frustrated and angry. You wouldn't catch people painting walls with peanuts or eggs, but chemical sensitivities are viewed as fish slapping escapades.

Food Challenges

Picture courtesy of http://familynature.wordpress.com

We are about to embark on another round of food challenges with Little B. He has become quite fussy of late, and unlike other parents I don’t have the ability to turn around and offer him alternative foods (Little B is currently allergic to some dairy, soy, egg, nuts and salicylates).

Normally this means that I have to rethink or recreate meals and snacks for him out of the ingredients he can already eat / tolerate. But after reading Jude Blereau's current book and chatting to our dietitian and paed gastro, I thought it was time for another round of food challenges. We are going to try in no particular order egg yolks, cashew nut butter and goat’s cheese. These are all good proteins, fats and low in salicylates.

I’m also aiming to take Little B along to a new naturopath who specialises in children and salicylate desensitisation, in the vain hope she can help us expand the variety of vegetables available to him.

As Meaghan has said at EcoMILF recently, you cant help worrying when your little one doesn’t want to eat. It’s the nurturer in us, it’s about being the mama.

Fingers crossed, I get one new food to incorporate into his menu. 

May contain traces of.....

Cross contamination is really big issue in allergy families. I often feel like we live in an allergy minefield. Generally if Little B has a reaction (depending on that reaction, for example, soy makes him bleed internally) we know what has caused it.

But then we have days or in this case weeks, where Little B shows obvious signs of allergy (for him) and we quite literally have no idea what is causing it. Recently Little B had allergy shiners, looked very pale and unwell, was sleeping poorly and had really weird stools and we had no idea why. Nothing had changed in his diet or life.

So then you start to clutch at straws – is environmental?, growth spurt?, a new allergen?, cross contamination?....I could quite literally go on for pages and pages.

But then Little B started to bleed from his bowels and we knew that we had a serious problem on our hands. After numerous discussions with his paed gastro, we were resigned that we may have to begin the strict elimination diet all over again looking for new allergens. This was devastating to me as it would have been literally like taking 200 steps backward to 16 months ago.

Until we discovered that the rice milk we use is now cross contaminated with soy. They used to make the milks on different lines and now in the name of cost cutting and saving dollars, they make both milks on the same line. Which is sheer hell for allergy families like ours.

We have removed this milk from Little B’s diet and his health has begun to improve. Almost immediately his stomach and bowels settled down and he began sleeping again.

Cross contamination is hard enough at the best of times without companies banging soy into everything (but that’s another post altogether).

Easter

Pic courtesy of http://www.catalogs.com/blog/images/easter.jpg

Easter is nearly upon us and it is our 2^nd Easter that Little B is aware of the event. We have already had a taste of it with the last day of preschool. There was an Easter egg hunt, easter baskets, hot cross buns and an easter hat parade. We solved this by making and providing Easter eggs for Little B to find and making and providing allergy friendly hot cross buns.

We aim for easter to be less chocolate-centric here at the House of B (for obvious reasons). For Easter, Little B gets one chocolate egg (home-made), a knitted beanie for winter and a book about Easter. From one set of grandparents, he gets a small wooden toy and the other have chosen a series of books, whereby he gets one to add to his collection each year.

We also spend Easter doing other things – lots of family and outdoors time, Little B and Granny B blow and paint real or paper mache eggs and we like to reinforce the change of seasons by working with him in our veggie garden.

Last year I melted and made chocolate Easter eggs using dairy, egg, soy and nut free chocolate. This year I made Chocolate Crackle Easter eggs (again dairy, soy, egg and nut free) and bought coloured foil to wrap them in. Very tasty and look great. Bonus is they are very easy to make.

Chocolate Crackle Easter Eggs

200g dark chocolate (we use 70% dark Cocolo chocolate)

100g dairy free butter, softened (we use Nuttelex)

5 tbsp golden syrup

100g crisp rice cereal (we use puffed brown rice)

1. Place the chocolate and butter in a medium bowl over a pan of simmering water, and stir until melted.
2. Remove tin from the heat and stir in cereal and golden syrup
3. Drop spoonfuls of the mixture in Easter egg or shape moulds.
4. Leave in the fridge for at least 1 hour to set.

Brazil Nuts

Recently I was diagnosed with an adult onset brazil nut allergy. I’ve never been allergic to nuts but started eating brazil nuts recently after reading they were good for preventing headaches and migraines. After eating them for about a week, I started to get very itchy all the time. My face particularly but my whole body itched and it drove me nuts (excuse the pun).

I ruled out lots of things and then decided to stop the nuts. My first nut trial coincided with changing hair products so I thought that caused the itching all over my body that started after 30 mins. The 2nd and last trial, I was convinced it was the brazil nuts (so tried nothing else new) then had two brazil nuts. Within 10 minutes I was itching all over, my eyes started stinging and puffing, and I felt awful. Some antihistamines worked after 30 minutes and then I felt like I’d been hit by a mack truck.

My doctor has told me to steer clear of brazil nuts (and possibly all nuts). The fact that my reaction is getting worse each time and happening quicker is a big red flag that I could progress to anaphylaxis.

But it has put me into a bit of a quandary. I know that Little B has an allergy to peanuts though it is very mild. It is also thought that he will outgrow this before he is 5. But with my experience, I’m now very wary of doing nut challenges on him.

Teddy Bears Picnic

We had Little B’s first food related event at kindy last week. The children had a teddy bears picnic and they all iced a teddy bear biscuit and then decorated them with sprinkles.

So I made faux gingerbread cookies and used a similar teddy bear cookie cutter. Then used some allergy friendly sprinkles by Nemar. The sprinkles were such a hit that the kindy will now only buy this brand as they don’t have any nasty colours, gluten or dairy in them.

But I’m very happy to report that Little B didn’t think his biscuit was any different to the others. Also the teachers were fantastic at explaining the biscuit beforehand just in case the other children noticed.

I’m very proud of the way they handled it and it reassured me that we had picked a good kindy for Little B to attend. I stayed and helped out as this was the first time they had done something food related with Little B and it was great fun (twenty 3 year olds playing with icing and sprinkles – there were a few that preferred to lick the very messy tables rather than ice the biscuits LOL) ☺

Bonus :-)

Well we have had a very unexpected bonus from the A2 milk. For the first time in his life, Little B is consistently sleeping for 11.5 to 12 hours per night. And even more shocking to us, a wake up time of 7am is becoming the done thing.

Why is this amazing I hear you say?? Well for most of Little B's life, a wake up time of 5-5.30am has been the norm. Sleeping only 9 hours a night and no day nap for a year was all he got. We used to think the dark circles under his eyes were primarily allergy shiners. But lo and behold with a few weeks of consistent sleep (and a nasty cold bug thrown in for good measure) there are no dark circles to be seen.

Its also helped that we've had warm weather. Little B always sleeps better when he's warm. Will just have to see how long this miracle continues ;-)

Postscript - Dairy allergy

Well they say if something seems too good to be true, then its too good to be true. After a few days on straight cow milk, Little B started showing signs of intolerance. His behaviour was awful, he couldnt concentrate, became very hyper and oppositional and defiant.

So now we are trialling A2 milk. So far so good. Only on our 2nd day but he has settled back down to normal again. We have to keep plodding at the dairy as his diet is restricted in so many other ways.

Oh well, onward and upwards...

Bam and the dairy allergy is gone.

(Pic courtesy of http://barfblog.foodsafety.ksu.edu/articles/raw-milk/)

You know if you told me when we first found out about Little B‘s allergies that one day he would outgrow one of them, I quite frankly wouldn’t have believed you. In fact, even 6 months ago I wouldn’t have believed you. But finally, Little B has outgrown one of his allergies.

It seems that the dairy allergy has bitten the dust. And I am so grateful. The last 12 months especially it has felt like he would NEVER outgrow anything or even that his reactions would never minimise in anyway. It has seemed like every food challenge was doomed to failure (and fail they did, time and time again).

So yay and time for the happy dance LOL. Mind you, we’ve only experimented with cow milk (but so far so good) and its been a long 2 week trial of that. What’s exciting is we now have another food option to offer in the narrow realm of food that Little B can eat.

The food trial continues over the next few weeks as we slowly introduce a few white mild cheeses. We will be avoiding yoghurt etc for at least another 6 months as Little B has always had an extremely strong reaction to both this and yellow cheeses.

Salicylates

I think salicylates are a poorly understood intolerance. Basically these are foods that have naturally occurring aspirin in them. The higher the salicylate the worse the reaction.

In Little B’s case, he becomes hyper (like he’s on speed), aggressive, doesn’t listen to anybody, loses language, and is more inclined to miss getting to the toilet in time (even though he has been toilet trained since he was 27 months). I truly believe he would have been diagnosed with ADHD if we hadn’t picked up on his intolerance so early on in life.

Little B used to wake up to 15 times a night, every night for the first year of his life. This was almost completely the result of salicylates. Unbeknownst to us we had been feeding him high sals food for most of his life. All the foods that are encouraged as first foods were the culprits (apple, avocado, corn, pumpkin) plus I was passing these foods through my breastmilk. By removing apple and avocado alone from his diet, we reduced his night waking from 15 times to 4 times a night in one week.

Then the challenge was on – the best guides were Sue Dengate and the Friendly Food cookbook by the RPA. The Friendly Food cookbook has a list of foods at the beginning divided into low, mod, high and really high. We avoid all high and really high sals foods, and ration out the mods, the low ones are part of his daily diet.

Unfortunately sals are even in things like vegemite, most fruit and vegies, olive oil and I could go on. I am happy to say we don’t regret removing these foods one bit. Little B is an absolute delight most of the time (other than the normal 3 year old habits) - he is a quiet, caring, happy child.

People often comment on how “hard” our life must be with a child who has multiple food allergies and intolerances. Or how “hard” it must be for me to watch his diet so carefully and to have to bake and cook almost everything from scratch.

Quite frankly, I would rather live with the food limitations and have a gorgeous happy child than go back to an out of control child who rarely slept but had a more varied diet. Now that was hard!!

Epiphany

I had the most amazing moment with Little B the other day. He was driving his dear mummy around the twist as only a 3 year old can, when in exasperation, I offered him some rolled oats that I was eating. Clear as a bell, he turns to me and says “I cant eat that, it will make me sick”.



But the epiphany was that this was completely true!! The oats I was eating had dairy and he knows I normally wont let him have them. But I am so grateful that he has reached the point that he knows to say no to foods he cant have.

The other turning point is he can verbally now tell people he has reflux. He amazed me again a few days later when he started getting reflux, and he a) told me exactly what was wrong (as if I couldn’t tell) and then b) told me what he needed to “feel” better – and was 100% on the money.

We’ve recently moved house and unfortunately the water supply has given both Little B and me reflux. The water tastes truly foul. We have solved this by purchasing a ceramic water purifier. At our old house, we had an inbuilt under sink water purifier, which was fantastic but not something we have the space for here until we renovate our kitchen.

So hopefully this resurgence in reflux will abate very quickly!!