Day One And Two Of The New Diet

It's hard to pick up and just start feeding your kid something different all of the sudden.  We skirted by with cereal because of the almond milk.  Now the cereal is plotting to shoot through his poor little colon like a bullet train, so that's out.

I stood in front of our cupboards and looked at all of the food before my eyes.  None of it was anything that Wade could eat.  So we went to Fresh and Easy because they have a Gluten Free list available. 

We’re excited to report that we are introducing more gluten-free products to our range over the next few months and are currently offering hundreds of items in our stores that are made without gluten-containing ingredients!

Customers told us they wanted more gluten-free products to choose from and to easily identify which ones were gluten-free; and we listened. Just look for the maroon and green icon next to notable gluten-free products in our stores. Next time you’re in, ask your Kitchen Table attendant for a full list or just download it from our website.

Source: Fresh And Easy Blog

The list can be found here, but we also did what they said and went to the Kitchen Table at our Calimesa store and talked to very friendly Josh and asked for a few copies of the list.

We dropped $20 on some fresh chicken legs, Rice Chex (gluten free, says so right on the box!) fresh fruit and veggies.  We didn't get any of the specialty stuff like brown rice pasta and gluten free pretzels, we just wanted to grab a handful of things that we could feed him throughout the week. 

We'd given him eggs and a banana that morning before he left for school but sure enough he was starving by 9:30 and begging for food at school according to his teacher.  She called me after school about the note I'd sent about Wade being allergic to gluten.  She told me she hadn't heard of such an allergy and and being such a young one that Mrs. Lemon Lime, she called her mom.  Her mom apparently flipped out and told her to call the child's mother right away!  Gluten allergy is serious business!  

Mrs. Lemon Lime tells me that she's never dealt with a wheat allergic kid.  And that the kid who brought donuts that day--yes donuts, that Wade couldn't eat--is lactose intolerant.  Furthermore there are five kindergarteners with peanut allergies at his school this year.

Regarding the donuts, Wade got an apple.  She said she wanted to cry with him.  But she promised not to eat a donut, and she also reported that other kids were jealous of Wade's apple.  Which is kind of awesome.

Her solution for when things like birthday donuts and cupcakes happen was for me to send snacks to school that Wade can eat.  I sent in a container of Rice Chex, some Orville Redenbacher kettle corn (because she warned me that the other kids were getting popcorn the next day) and a bag of Skittles. 

He ended up being all right though for his first day.  He did come home and clear some grapes, some Rice Chex (dry) and two corns on the cob before taking a nap.  Then for dinner he had a chicken leg and some roasted potatoes.

We're trying to figure out how to make him full.  His calorie count is down due to the lack of wheaty things and his hunger is way up because he's trying to gain back what he lost while he was down.  This morning we were smarter and gave him eggs with chicken and potatoes so it would stick to his ribs a little better.  We've been warning him not to eat the school lunches but wouldn't you know our kid actually outsmarted us?

Resourceful little lad he is, he thought about how he asks for soy milk from the cafeteria, so maybe they'd have gluten free stuff too.

Sure enough, they did.  And I never would have known this if he hadn't of asked.

Go Wade for being smart!

He told us that he asked a man in the cafeteria for gluten free food and they gave him some special cinnamon toast and cereal and even some berry punch.  Double breakfast for the win.

For lunch he had more eggs, chicken and potatoes and some Chex Mix that I made him with Nutella and peanut butter.  For dinner it's hamburger patties and mashed potatoes.

No wheat turds to report.  We must be watching those tricky labels well!

The Culprit

"My sick kid isn't sick at all!  The poo analysis came back and said that there were no parasites.  In fact his poo was clean as poo can be."

That was the conclusion to two weeks of cleaning up vomit and diarrhea and watching little five year old Wade waste away.

Wade was lactose intolerant to begin with.  Well, a few months into his life anyway, when I realized that the cow milk based formula was making him sick.  Throughout his life we've slowly introduced him to cheeses and butters and items that have trace amounts of milk in them.  He's handled everything fine, but was never able to drink regular milk.

And oddly, around the same time he was born, I had developed lactose intolerance as well.

So we were soy kids together.  But soy milk is slimy to me and the cookies never soak it up right, so for a while I switched to rice milk, and have stuck permanently to almond milk.  I love that in the past year a few companies like Silk and Almond Breeze have come out with refrigerated half gallons instead of the little shelved quarts I used to have to buy.  I am also able to eat things with trace amounts of milk in them, and I can handle most cheeses.  My problem is straight milk.  I've also tried Lactaid and it makes me barf.  So it's me against the cows, pretty much.

Then two weeks ago Wade got very sick.  He would go to school and be fine, and then once we fed him lunch he'd throw up again.  This went on for about a week until it got so bad that we decided just to keep him home from kindergarten.

We too him to the emergency room one night because he was dehydrated, or so we thought, and he was pumped full of saline and given an anti nausea medication.  The medication would work, but once it wore off he'd throw up again.  We were beginning to think that he'd gotten some kind of parasite but we weren't sure how or where he would have gotten it.

A few days later we made a trip to urgent care and some tests were ran.  The emergency room had done some blood tests and said that he was fine, but since we weren't convinced since he was still puking, the urgent care doctors wanted us to do a stool sample, but also put him on a liquid diet for 12 hours, followed by the BRAT diet for 12 hours, followed by introducing solid foods again slowly.

The liquid diet was hard.  He was starving, you could tell, and with no energy he just laid on the couch all day not moving very much.  And when we got to the BRAT stage (BRAT = Banans, Rice, Applesauce, Toast) we were told by a family friend who is a wheat allergy sufferer to maybe leave out the toast part since wheat is kind of hard for our tummies to digest anyway.

Boy does Wade hate rice.  And applesauce.  But he loves bananas and Jell-O so that's pretty much what he had, followed by a very carefully placed piece of boiled tilapia at dinner time.  No fish is not on the diet but we decided to see what would happen--plus he'd been practically starving himself for two days and it was getting very sad.  Especially because we could now see his ribs and his face had clearly lost a bit of chub.

Three days later everything looked great.  He was ready to go back to school, pooping solidly, and totally not throwing up.  Until of course he did when he went to visit his aunt.

I asked what he ate.  It was some eggs with a bit of cheese, and a granola bar.  It was then that I did the research and found that the funny sounding malt syrup on the back of the package turned out to be one of the many names that wheat hides under.

We thought back over this whole barfing period and realized that every time he'd thrown up there was wheat somehow involved.

The spaghetti that made him sick in the middle of the night the first night.  The bowl of cereal that he didn't even get halfway through before he puked it up.  The Toast part of the BRAT diet that made him vomit during the day--that when we removed, caused him to no longer vomit.

The ramen we gave him when he was down.

The ramen we gave him when he'd come home from school saying "I feel much better" that would come back up.

The granola bar his dad fed him after three days without vomit.

We've found our culprit.  Even before the stool samples came back negative for parasites.  We're talking about wheat here, buddy.  Wheat's the one to beat. 

And so we're going through a big lifestyle change here.  One snack at a time.

Welcome to our wheat free home on the web.