You want me to be GFree?!?!?!

Have you just been told that you or someone in your family needs to be gluten free for medically reasons?  Are you looking for someone who has been there and done that?  Are you feeling like you will never have another good meal?  Are you feeling like it is too expensive to eat gluten free?  Are you overwhelmed?  Well, I can understand completely!  Take a deep breathe and relax.  I won't lie and say it is easy but I will say that you can learn and you can take care of yourself (or family member) successfully with simple changes to the way you think about food.  I remember getting off the phone with my son's doctor and thinking -- man this might be too much for me but I need to figure it out.  I had some moments that I was overwhelmed and frustrated and not sure if I would be able to maintain a gfree lifestyle.  However, I knew I had too!  He is my son, my blood, my responsibility.  It was killing me to watch him in so much pain and he was truly miserable.  So could something as simple as a new diet help him be able to be a child who isn't in constant pain?  My prayers were that I could figure it out and figure it out fast.

The call from the doctor that celiacs disease "may be" what is wrong but that we would need to take him to a GI specialist to be sure.  So what does a mom do?  Does she sit and wait for a GI appointment?  Or does she take action?  Well I am one that took action!  I went home and fired up my laptop and had my printer printing all sorts of information.  I also reserved books at the library and went to pick them up before the library closed.  I wanted as much information as I could possible get so that I knew what we were getting into.  Good thing that I reacted and started because it ended up taking us 6 months to see the GI specialist.

My husband arrived home from work and found me fired up to make our house safe for our son.  As I was going thru the pantry I was telling my husband about the phone call with the doctor, what we should expect to get the CD (celiac disease) diagnosis and what I wanted to do to go gfree then.  Now, you may be thinking, "I don't have CD, just a gluten intolerance."  The information I will write about applies to both diagnosis.  I started on Friday by figuring out what I needed to do and enlisted my husband to help me go thru foods to get rid of gluten containing foods.

At this point, I didn't know every hidden word that meant gluten but I was at least making progress with the obvious.  So I will tell you - that your first decision that you need to make is will you make your home 100% gluten free or will you have a dual kitchen?  I decided from the beginning that we would be 100% gluten free.  We have always had the policy that if someone in the house is allergic to it we don't have it in the house.  My reason for this is multifaceted:

1. I never want to have the fear of someone eating something they shouldn't because they were too young to protect themselves.
2. I never want to have someone feel like they are "not normal" because they can't enjoy something the rest of us are having.
3. I really want to make stuff as simple as possible - so the idea of cooking two meals or at least double of some parts of the meal did not appeal to me at all.

You will make your decision and I will respect that.  I made my decision for everyone to be gfree at least while in the house.  My other children still continued to eat school breakfast and lunch, my husband continued to eat gluten at the office, and I would eat gluten while I was out but not at home.  

If I had to make the decision again I would make the same decision because my son hasn't been cross contaminated in our home.  When we traveled this summer, my parents and grandmother respected our gfree diet and restrictions and they were on board too.  My parents purchased new kitchen items so that I knew we were keeping my son safe and I purchased new things for my grandmother's house.  More on this later.

When I return to write my next blog entry, I will go into more details about how I made my kitchen and my family's kitchens safe and gfree.

With much Aloha,

Gfree Mom