Barley is yummy!

I made the executive decision to put Ben on an elimination diet, thanks to Dr. Sears. I trekked to Whole Foods, dropped a large wad of cash and set out to make this as pleasant on him as possible. We're going to nix these allergies and rashes once and for all!

Today we discovered:


Ben really likes peach/mango/goat milk smoothies!


A child can consume a huge bowl of butternut squash in one minute. Who knew it would be his favorite new veggie?!


Barley is AMAZING with a little goat milk and a drizzle of honey. Seriously - AMAZING! I ate a whole bowl for dinner. Ben didn't share my excitement, however.


Also, I have awesome friends! My friend Anne came over last night with a bottle of yummy wine and an awesome chick flick to give me some adult interaction. She rocks!

Tim should be home in 2.5 hours and I'm counting down every last minute!!!!

Milk's the culprit?

For those of you following the WHERE IS THIS STUPID FACE RASH COMING FROM?!?!?!?!!? saga, time for an update. As of last Sunday, I got rid of the milk. It seemed too coincidental that this face rash started around one year, when he also began drinking milk. What didn't, and still doesn't, make sense to me is that he can eat things with dairy in it just fine. Anyway, let's get to the results of this experiment, shall we.

About six days off the whole milk:



Since the rash didn't go away, I chalked it up to a failed experiment and reintroduced milk yesterday. This afternoon, he looks like this:



YIKES! I still don't know if it's coincidental because I reintroduced the milk yesterday afternoon and he was completely fine until just about an hour ago. And his rashes have been known to come and go in intensity regardless of diet. But it's a start and we are becoming a dairy-free family...that for sure.

In other news, Tim's coming home Thursday! Man, it can't come soon enough!

Just a whole sleu of pictures...

...because today was a GREAT day!

Woe is me.

So I've been kind of quiet the last few days, and it's for good reason. I'm trying not to be a total downer. But I'm giving up. I just am a downer right now, and getting it off my chest helps. So here goes. This week, while Tim is away, I've had to deal with:

1. A pukey baby. I'm VERY vomit-phobic and while I knew the stomach bug would definitely happen at some point, I wasn't prepared to handle it alone.

2. A pukey dog. Our Yorkie is a puker. He just is - it's his nature, I guess. But yesterday was a doozie. Can dogs catch stomach bugs from people? If so, then he did. To get really gross on you, I'll mention that my other dog is an eater of all things disgusting - including other dogs' vomit. Sorry, I warned you. Couple that with a curious baby and it was no easy feat to clean up dog puke while warding off our other puke-eating dog and a baby who just wanted to play in puke puddles.

3. A burned out kitchen lightbulb. In the face of everything else, this is really no big deal, I'm aware. But it's NOT an easy light fixture to change out by yourself and my house is kind of creepy with a dark kitchen at night.

4. A broken bathroom pipe. I awoke to a soaking wet bathroom today, which was so uncool. The pipe under our sink has never worked, but Tim had it rigged up temporarily. Until it decided to screw with me and break open during the night, soaking the floor and possibly ruining our vanity. Yay!

5. A sleep strike - Why does Ben choose these kinds of weeks to go on sleep strike?

Truly, I shouldn't complain. I have it easy in comparison to my hubs, who is severely overworked right now. And because I don't tell him enough:

I appreciate you, honey, and all that you do for our family!

The plunge.

As my husband often tells me, I am always searching for ways to fit inside a box. Instead of being happy being ME, I strive to become a label. He is so right.

Before Ben was born, I started reading about a little ole thing called Attachment Parenting. Yes! I thought. I am going to practice Attachment Parenting. I'm going to co-sleep, breastfeed, practice child-led sleep & eating habits and the like.

And then reality set in. By about five months, I realized that we had a real problem. Our precious little baby didn't want to nap, didn't want to sleep through the night or anything even closely resembling that, was a sporadic nurser (which probably contributed to losing my supply) and so on. Things were not going well. But I was an AP mom and I was convicted in those beliefs. What would people think of me if I sleep trained? Or put Ben on a schedule?! I could no longer call myself an Attachment Parent if I let Ben cry it out.

So I bought a book called and I began to sleep train. I put Ben on a strict schedule which involved two naps a day, eating every 3.5 hours and sleeping through the night. We let him CIO. Suddenly, life was good. Ben was happy, we were rested and our household started flowing much more smoothly. But I struggled. What kind of mom was I? I still cloth diapered and I bought all organic products for Ben, but he was now on formula, no longer co-sleeping and was CIO at night. Was I half AP/half traditional?

I teetered on the brink of losing my mind for awhile. I felt inadequate as a mom because I had no milk supply and had failed at Attachment Parenting. I convinced myself that I had irrevocably screwed Ben up by sleep training him and filling his belly with artificial breast milk. This went on for a long time.

And then, like a lightning bolt from the sky, I had a moment. I realized, thanks to my friend, Melissa, that this is all okay. We do what we can afford to do, what God gives us the ability to do, and at the end of the day, we have GOT to be okay with that. Rather than sulk and cry in my pillow about my lost milk supply, I should have been embracing the simple fact that I got to nurse my child for seven months! Rather than beat myself up because my entire pantry isn't full of organic products, I should be happy that we can afford to keep Ben's products and food organic. I spent so much time feeling like a failure that I didn't have the energy to see what was right in front of me. I'm a

This week, I had a breakthrough. My friend, Claire, sent me the link to this article on homemade laundry detergent. I've spent so much time agonizing over what we can afford to buy organic that I didn't even stop to think that I could be making my own products for less than the chemical-ridden ones in our home. This opened the door to a million things for me! I suddenly sought out all sorts of homemade recipes! I chucked our cleaning products and replaced them with water/vinegar/baking soda. I researched no 'poo, the oil cleansing method, homemade toothpaste, and Dr Bronners.

Monkeying around.

We had an awesome little play date tonight that was SO much cooler than I even thought it could be. There's this local play gym called Little Monkey Bizness that's pretty much the coolest spot to be as a parent. Kids play, we eat pizza & drink coffee! Brilliant, right?

We met our friends Anne, Jon and little baby Will (he's 3 days younger than Ben) and had a rockin' good time. Will & Ben actually played together, which is pretty much a first. I guess Ben must be getting to that age where playing together is finally fun! He used to be a lil bully. :
















(And no, I haven't cut his mullet yet.)

I even threw together a little updo and felt kinda pretty for the first time in awhile. It's amazing what a little make-up and fifteen minutes in the mirror can do for a girl's self-esteem. I'm not a snow driver (as I've already documented) and with my month-long shopping excursion done long ago and snow on the ground, we just haven't been out of the house much. That means I've been sporting sweatshirts and comfy pants for weeks. I think I needed tonight as much as Ben!

Now, proof that I'm an absolute dork, here's a picture of muh hair. I'm obviously quite proud of myself for pulling this together in ten minutes:

Please solve our mystery.

I'm currently accepting ALL suggestions as to this plague running through my little guy's body. As documented earlier today, Ben's face rash was finally almost gone. This was amazing since his face has been in such bad shape for so long now. So I'm like, "Ooh, let's document this occasion with a picture!" I guess I jinxed us, because I put him down for a nap right after that picture and this is how he looked when he woke up:





HELP! I'm so frustrated and so tired of seeing my little babe like this. :( He's been allergy tested and he's only allergic to eggs and peanuts. I've scrutinized everything that's gone in his mouth for a week now, and there hasn't been a trace of either. I thought maybe it could be something in his crib, but I just washed his sheets over the weekend with the same detergent as always and he slept in that same crib all weekend, when his face improved. I just don't get it. He ate his normal breakfast this morning.


Yeah, kiddo. I feel ya!



UPDATE: Since this post gets a lot of traffic from people searching about face rashes and I get emails every week about it, I'm going to update it here.  My son struggled with these face rashes for around 5 or 6 months.  They got much, much worse before they got better.  I'll never know for sure what caused them, but I'm 99% certain it was eczema and I believe it was brought on by food sensitivities.  We did an elimination diet that really seemed to help that you can read about here.  I've since learned that eczema is usually the body's way of expelling something it doesn't like (a toxin), which is why we went through the elimination diet.

This article is obviously a holistic-skewed article, but it's one we very much found success with.  Our doctor tested Ben's zinc levels and they were incredibly low, so around the same time that we started the elimination diet, we also started supplementing him with zinc by doctor's orders.  Within a few days of these things, his face rash started clearing up and within a few weeks, was gone completely.  So, while zinc has not been proven scientifically to improve eczema yet, we definitely noticed a drastic difference, though we'll never know if it was the zinc or the diet.  He has since grown out of all of his food intolerances except for peanuts, which is a full-blown allergy.  At 3.5 years old, he now has no eczema to speak of.  We treated the last of his eczema (behind his knees) with Arbonne, and literally overnight it was gone.  You can read about that here.

Good luck!  My heart goes out to anyone who stumbles across this post who is also struggling with these issues.

 

Please forgive any typos. I'm so tired I can't see straight.

I could write a lovely post about how squishy my baby's cute cheeks are or how adorable his little cloth diaper booty is (well, really it's GIGANTIC). I could talk about the way he curls his arms up underneath his body when he's snuggling against us to let us know he's ready for bed. Or how his "Mommy come back!" whimper melts my heart and sends me running right back to him. I could (er, I guess I just did) but instead I'm going to rant.

This mama is exhausted! The hubs is on a business trip - something that's become a regular occurrence 'round these parts - and normally, that would be fine. But normally, my child sleeps. Normally he goes to bed at 7:00 and wakes up at 6:00. Last night was not normally.

I snuggled into my empty bed around midnight, thinking I'd get a glorious six hours of sleep. Hm, guess who thought wrong? At 12:30, shrieks and wails came blasting through the baby alarm (a typo that stays). That continued until 5:00, by which point my eyelids were drooping down to my knees and I was propping them up with tubes of butt paste.

I guess this is the consequence of that tooth I feel popping through. Dear teeth: please leave my child alone. Thank you.

And since I'm on a roll, I'll end this rant with another one. Not only is Ben's rash not any better after eliminating all eggs, it's much, much worse. :(

Edited because I forgot yet another rant: See that picture above? That's Ben discovering that he can turn our DVR off and on and off and on and off and on. It would be cute if it weren't for the fact that a DVR that never stays on is of no use to me. Apparently when they're off, they don't record scheduled shows. A crazy concept, I know.