Random Notes

Feeling a little blue and overwhelmed. I was sick all last week and now it seems I've come down with a cold.

But I have watched some good movies lately!

Josh and I watched To Kill a Mockingbird. Wonderful movie. It did make me weepy though. For some reason, every nostalgia emotion crowded into my little ole heart and I spent the rest of the day with my throat (already sore) getting lumps in it and my eyes welling with tears. A couple of heartfelt sobs emerged from time to time. I missed my mom and dad. I missed my childhood. I missed Gregory Peck.

I did get over that though!

I watched the movie Waiting for Superman twice. Once by myself when I was too tired to get out of bed one day. I find it so interesting that it is the product of the same guy who did An Inconvenient Truth, which was so 'liberal' in outlook, since thinking global warming is a real threat is a 'liberal cause.' I put quotation marks because I really hate the stupid liberal/conservative break down of every issue. Anyway, this movie, Waiting for Superman, puts the failure of our public schools squarely in the lap of the teachers' union. Not so liberal there. And even goes to say that the two major teachers unions own the Democratic party at the federal level. They own some of the Republicans at the state level. A very moving movie that makes you think. I watched the movie again days later with Sean. I think he found eye-opening too.

I watched Werner Herzog's movie of the Chauvet cave in France. Whenever I see those cave paintings I think of G.K. Chesterton's book The Everlasting Man and how he starts off that book. And he didn't even have the benefit of these latest cave paintings (the oldest found so far 30,000 to 32,000 years old - discovered in 1994). Herzog is great except I can do without his narration which is almost comically tense with emotion. A little too theatrical for my tastes. But the movie was gorgeous and fascinating.

That's it for the movies.

I have watched two very inspiring clips on youtube lately:

Peter Kreeft's How to Win the Culture War

An Interview with Andrew Kern

I've also been listening to The Late Middle Ages, a lecture series by the Teaching Company. I listened to the Early Middles Ages by this same professor several weeks ago. It is very interesting and I am learning new things. I thought I had a better understanding of the Middle Ages than I actually do. The professor is excellent, however, he has a really nasal voice and he's always saying 'aaannnnddd' and thaaaaannnn.' That takes a bit of getting used to, but overall, the course is really intriguing.

This is all for my own self-education, though some has been shared with the kids.

Okay, I am girding my loins for today. I want to get a lot of academic stuff done this a.m. Rick is about to leave for the airport, a quick two night trip to California.

GF/CF note for Monday 2/18/13

Thought I'd jot down yesterday's dietary news.

Breakfast was a success for me and Becky. We like the Peanut Butter Panda Puffs with almond milk. I put sliced banana on mine. Tasty, filling and quick. Becky doesn't believe in fruit on cereal but she liked hers too. Sean does not like them, I learned. So instead he had peanut butter on rice cakes. He was happy with that. Josh was very discouraged that there was no real milk in the house. Later on in the day he went out got bread and milk to keep him and Rick happy.

Even though I was sick, I sent Becky to Aquinas. I packed her up some of the last of the cheese and then a lot of gluten free stuff to snack on. I think I really have to buy a bunch of boxes of gluten free chicken nuggets from Whole Foods and just cook up 5 or 6 for her lunch on Mondays. As it was, she was so ravenous that we stopped at McDonalds on the way home from picking her up and she had not gluten free chicken nuggets and french fries. Sigh. It really is hard with that girl.

I had a great lunch. I ate a big salad with some left over steak on it, oil and vinegar for dressing. Sean didn't know what he wanted. I served him some gf/cf lunch meat on little toothpick skewers and some corn chips with hummus. He refused the hummus (even though he's liked it before) and was suspicious of the blue in the corn chips. Note so to self: don't buy blue corn chips. He was still hungry a bit later so he wound up eating pb and rice cakes again.

I need to buy more peanut butter!

Dinner - another fail! I don't know what it is with me and not being able to defrost chicken in time. I thought I had gotten it out early enough in the day (11 or so) that by 5 it would be defrosted. It was a big whole chicken and it was still partially frozen. I ran it under water and wrestled with it a bit and put back when I thought we'd eat dinner by a half hour. I made really good roasted potatoes. I peeled and chopped up potatoes into smallish chunks, nuked them in the microwave to 'parboil' them, then rolled them in some olive oil, garlic salt, salt and pepper and stuck them in the oven at 350 degrees for about an hour. Yum! I dumped the last of the mushrooms on too. Everyone loved them. But the chicken wasn't finished cooking. In fact it was still half raw. So Rick, who was hungry, ordered chinese food from P.F. Changs because I'd read they had a big gluten free menu. By the time he got home with the food though the chicken was cooked. So I have to do something with it. The chinese food was good! I only ate a little because by that time it was 8 and I was getting tired and didn't feel like eating anymore.

Today, I am seriously considering eating the Chinese food for breakfast (Becky and Josh can have eggs), going to our planned lunch at Five Guys and then doing something with the chicken for dinner tonight. I might doctor up some soup and put lots of chicken in it. Tomorrow we can have chicken salad for lunch.

GF/CF weekend hits and misses

After our miserable Friday, we had some successes over the weekend, though some tears as well.

Saturday a.m. I decided to replace bagel morning with donut morning. The donuts were from Kinnikinnick They were delicious! A definite hit. I put out the chocolate and the cinnamon sugar ones. The chocolates were really good but the cinnamon sugar were really, really delicious. They went first and usually in this house anything chocolate goes first.

Well, donuts don't really hold you for long but on Saturdays we've decided we are doing lunch at Chick fil a. I wasn't feeling well (I was actually sick all weekend and am playing hooky from Aquinas today because I've lost my voice) so I didn't go, but Rick took Becky and Sean (Josh was off on retreat with his CLC group). They had the grilled chicken on fruit salad and the waffle fries. It was a good lunch and GF/CF.

For dinner, I cooked up some lamb tips I'd bought at Trader's Joe's over some basmati rice cooked in chicken broth. The kids ate a little of the lamb but it was too fatty for them. They ate some of the rice, but not a lot. I tried to get some fruit and veggies down them too, but met with limited success. Rick liked everything though! So did I.

Sunday breakfast was easy because we didn't have RE. I am not sure what I am going to do next Sunday. Anyway, I made turkey sausage, scrambled eggs and TJ's gluten free pancakes. The kids didn't like them with syrup because they became too doughy. But toasted and then smeared with pumpkin butter, they were delicious!

Sunday lunch just kinda, sorta didn't happen. I really wasn't feeling well. Rick was helpless in the face of our dietary restrictions, plus he was running errands and helping Sean with math. So the kids got really hungry and weepy and we had to do some stop gap snacking which wasn't very satisfying.

Rick grilled steak, hamburgers and hot dogs. We missed our cheeseburgers. Sean is the only one who likes the rolls. Becky and Josh just ate hotdogs. I had steak and a hamburger. I also cooked up some frozen fries and sauteed lots of mushrooms to go with the steak. I put out some baby carrots and sliced cucumbers. Things went over pretty well.

The Journal of Best Practices - Book 8

The full title of this book is The Journal of Best Practices; A Memoir of Marriage, Asperger Syndrome and One Man's Quest to be a Better Husband by David Finch.

David Finch marries the girl he's had a crush on and been best friends with since high school. But it is now five years into the marriage and they are estranged and disappointed. Where did their love go? Finch's wife figures it out: he's got Asperger's Syndrome. Once Finch realizes this, he begins to use his analytical and obsessive tendencies to zero in on how to become a better husband and save his marriage. What he can't get intuitively, he can get by analyzing and problem solving. Thus he takes a businessman's approach to his problem and he begins to keep a journal of best practices; what is the cause of the conflict and what actions need to be taken in order to solve that conflict.

Finch writes well and is very funny at times. The book is so sweet in that he loves his wife so much and she obviously wants the marriage to work as well. She is incredibly patient and honest with him. The whole book is really a primer on how two very unhappy but loyal spouses can work things out through hard work and sheer determination. The first vital component is communication. Finch gets things wrong all the time in weird, weird ways because of his Asperger syndrome. He doesn't mean to be insensitive, he just often is completely clueless. The next component is dealing with Finch's egocentricity. Aspergerians live in their own world and are very self-absorbed. It can look like raging selfishness but it is the way they are wired. They need to learn to add others into the formula. Another major component was dealing with Finch's quirky OCD tendencies and the way he flips out in anger when tiny little things that wouldn't make any difference to a 'neurotypical,' make his world fall apart.

Finch works through all this systematically. His love for his wife and kids and his willingness to be completely honest with himself and then lay it all out there in the book is really admirable.

While I did enjoy this book very much, there were a couple of things that bothered me about it. First of all, it brought to mind that scene from that Woody Allen movie where he's standing in line somewhere and he asks this other couple in the line (or maybe it was a party) how they keep their relationship going and they both answer, 'We're really shallow.' Finch and wife aren't the deepest people in the world. Finch looks to the likes of Howard Stern and Oprah Winfrey to learn about communication. He turns to reading Cosmo magazine to see how his wife ticks and the way they bond in friendship is by watching some show about runway models together. Whatever floats your boat, but frankly, they just seem pop culture deep. I felt like in real life, I wouldn't have really been able to connect with them much. The other thing is the use of expletives was rampant in the book. I mean the guy thinks in expletives. Do people really go around saying f you to their spouse all the time like that? I would say that right there might be a problem too. Maybe it hit me harder this time because this was the forth 'current' book I've read in a two week period and every one of them was just full of expletives. Is this our modern legacy in writing? That we can't talk without being so incredibly crass? I mentioned it to my husband and he said he resents that because it takes away the power of a good expletive! If you just use them once in a while they have meaning but if you are forever speaking so the language just gets watered down, meaningless, while still being abrasive. It made me long for richer, more eloquent language.

Also, as I read the book I started to think that a lot of what Finch was dealing with, about folding and putting away laundry, or who cleans the kitchen, etc was something that any couple would experience and that this wasn't necessarily Asperger's that was creating the problem. He talks about his wife in glowing terms, but as the book went along I thought, hey, she could maybe pitch in a little bit here too! But as the book drew to its end, it occurred to me that his wife had probably abdicated some things too, simply out of self-protection. Being newly married, having two children, a consuming career and a husband who can't relate to you is a bit overwhelming. She probably got into some sloppy habits simply because she couldn't keep all the balls up in the air by herself, especially when feeling so bewildered and heart broken over the unhappiness in the marriage.

All in all, this was a good book. It had a lot of insight into relationships and how to make them work. I am glad Finch was so humble and honorable about dealing with his difficulties. He does really love his wife and that was heartwarming to read.

For more book reviews go to Read 52 Books in 52 Weeks.

Healing the New Childhood Epidemics - Book 7

Healing the New Childhood Epidemics by Dr. Kenneth Bock details the approach he has developed when treating children with autism, ADHD, asthma and allergies. All four of these syndromes or conditions have been on the rise at a frightening rate for the last 20 years especially. It is not just a matter of better diagnosis either. Dr. Bock thinks there is a complicated interplay between genetic vulnerability, nutritional issues due to our industrialized food system and environmental toxins such as heavy metals accumulating in the body. The book is very detailed and systematic. I didn't feel like he was trying to sell me anything, but really just wanted to get information out there to help parents and their children who are struggling so with these conditions.

The book begins with several cases that Dr. Bock has worked with over the years that illustrate how children respond so positively to his very sensitive and practical approach. The cases are pretty extreme and heartbreaking. One thing that made me trust Dr. Bock is that while many of the patients were healed, not all were completely. Not all the issues went away, but were so reduced that life, instead of being a living hell, became quite manageable and full of hope. I didn't feel Dr. Bock was trying to sell me a magic cure at all.

Dr. Bock takes a four prong approach to dealing with healing or improving these epidemic illnesses. The first is diet. He has several diets listed going from fairly restrictive to extremely restrictive. And the fairly restrictive is actually pretty restrictive by any normal point of view. The diet is to go gluten and casein free. Many children with these disorders respond positively to this diet. He explains the whole chemistry behind why this is so. Gluten is found in bread and in all sorts of processed foods. So many, many people are going gluten free nowadays because celiac disease is on the rise. But even if you don't have celiac's the gluten and casein (a protein found in dairy foods) can still mess up those neurotransmitters in your brain. Between 50 and 60% of kids struggling with the 4-A disorders, as Dr. Bock refers to them, respond positively to taking gluten and casein out of their diets. That's a pretty big percentage!

We just had our first gluten free/casein free day yesterday. Sean and I are going whole hog with it. Becky tried but towards the end of the day had a bagel, some cheese crackers and then some tortilla with cheese melted on them. It's gonna take a while for her. I do think she is truly addicted to cheese! But Seano was a trooper. Even though he is struggling so much with depression right now, or maybe because of it, he really wants to feel better, so if this diet can clear the fog and get those transmitters firing more normally, it could really help the depression, I'm thinking. Everything is so interrelated for him. Beyond the gluten/casein free diet are other more restrictive diets which I can't even handle really thinking about right now. I am sure you would need a nutritionist to help you figure the 4 or 5 foods that are eventually left! I'm exaggerating a bit there! A lot of it though is kind of a modified Paleo diet, so it is doable. Not easy, but then if you are desperate, you'll do what it takes!

The second prong, which I have not really started on, is supplementation. Kids suffering from these conditions are often very nutritionally depleted in certain minerals, fats, vitamins and enzymes. I feel I need to get Sean tested and I am not sure who to turn to for this. I am afraid of quackery! I need to talk to my pediatrician. Anyway, kids are given certain supplements to restore balance to their chemistry. The book outlines a very detailed list of every kind of thing they may need and spells out everything very clearly. But it gets rather over my head at this point. I just found all the information a bit too much to take in, so I kind of skimmed and then decided I would focus on diet first and once I felt I had a handle on that, I'd move on. I can only process so much at a time.

The 3rd prong is detoxification. I have heard for years about the connection between autism and vaccines. I know someone who is convinced that's what triggered her daughter's epilepsy and developmental delays. I know this is controversial, but Dr. Bock's explanation made sense to me. So many of the children do seem to change after having their vaccinations. This has happened too many times and is evidenced by videos even, before and after the vaccinations, to be always chalked up to the idea that the parents simply want to find something to blame and noticed the problems after the vaccinations. There are heavy metals in these vaccines and if the child is genetically vulnerable, there can be some kind of complex chemical reaction that makes the immune system or the brain (all interrelated) go haywire. We get metals from other sources too like medication and environmental exposure. I couldn't read the portion of the book closely either, as again, I was suffering from information overload. And again this is a process where a doctor is needed to first test to see if there is an excess of metals present and if so which ones. The detoxification treatment depends on each individual child's needs. We haven't reached that step yet.

The final and 4th prong is medication. Dr. Bock thinks that in some cases medication really does help. He lays out a thorough analysis of when drugs are appropriate, which types to use and all their various pros and cons.

I have a feeling this book is going to get dog-eared after I'm through with it. It lays out a very sensible systematic, but complicated path. Dr. Bock seems very caring and his observations and advice is very hopeful. I like how thorough he is (even though for me, a beginner in all this, it was overwhelming) and I like that he doesn't veer off into things that make me a little nervous, like some New Age practices that promise to cure everything. I don't think, truly, that there is a cure out there. I do think though things can be improved. That's what I am hoping for.

For more reviews go to 52 Books.

Look Me In the Eye - Book 6

Look Me In the Eye is another book by John Elder Robison. I just finished reading his Be Different the other week. Look Me In the Eye is a memoir of his life and while it covers pretty much the same territory as Be Different, it has enough of a different orientation to be interesting. Be Different is more an analysis of the difference Asperger's made in his life. He looks back and sees where it had negative effects and where it helped him; and also how he learned to cope. Look Me in the Eye is more of a straight memoir. I found the book really engrossing. Since it came out before Be Different, it had some information in it that was sort of assumed in the latter book, so it cleared up some questions I was left with.

One thing that saddened me was that in Be Different, Robison writes about how sorry he is that his second marriage failed. In Look Me in the Eye, he talks about how happy he is in his second marriage. That kind of broke my heart a bit. He seemed so happy (though odd!) about his marriage.

Robison is a really good writer with a ton of insight. He's also strange, but in a nice way. He just seems like a really nice guy. It is amazing all the struggles people go through and still manage to come out in one piece, more or less. I loved all the stories about his son Cubby. The fact that, in spite of everything, he still loved his father and mother so much is really touching.

For more reviews go to Read 52 Books in 52 Weeks.

GF/CF - Day 3

Yesterday was an awful food day. No bread, no dairy, no meat. Very unsatisfying. Unfortunately, we did not display the proper penitential attitude that would have been a blessing on our first Friday in Lent.

So I've decided I need to make sure I always have the following on hand:

Cereal and almond milk

Rice cakes and peanut butter (that the kids actually like)

tortilla chips

fruit - apples, bananas, raisins, citrus

juice - apple cider and TJ's orange, banana, strawberry everybody is currently loving

Tomato soup

various types of frozen potatoes

eggs

raw veggies and hummus


some kind of sweets that the kids like - fruit roll ups, ginger snaps have gone over well. Meringues not so much.