You never realize the importance of the passenger seat airbag "ON" light illuminating until it doesn't any longer. Little things like this are taken for granted. Kinda like how the sun will always rise. Until it doesn't. So when the light glowed last week (for the first time in over a year) as my daughter Abigail settled into the seat, we were silent. It's significance meant more than just the reassurance it provided, it meant my daughter was healing. The sun was rising and man was it bright. At 82 pounds and 13 years old, she was slight but strong, her weight enough to allow her to sit in the front passenger seat. This was June 2016 and around this time, things started to change. Long tearful stints in the bathroom, tummy aches after every meal or snack. A general feeling of malaise that ...
Search Results for: SIBO
Raised Bed Garden Glow Up Part 2: Staining
Thanks to Vermont Natural Coatings for partnering with me on this post. All thoughts and opinions belong to yours truly. When it comes to staining my raised beds, it's gotta be clean. If you go to any home improvement center looking for exterior wood stain, you'll find shelf after shelf of options that will do the job. Very few however, offer the reassurance I require of anything I use in and around my home. The thought of chemicals invading the soil in my organic garden and infiltrating the fruits and veg I grow for my family creeps me out. I've always been conscious of the foods we eat, especially so following the diagnosis of my daughter's digestive disorder in 2017. I became an even bigger food snob. Quality of life comes down to lifestyle and clean food is a huge part of that ...
How Do Insects Survive in a Garden Surrounded By Fear?
For years I've feared my garden was nothing more than a siren's song. A place full of beautifully enticing things birds and insects can't resist. And, in recent years, the place they've unwittingly come to die. My neighborhood has about 300 homes. Fire blight ridden Callery pear trees line the parkway and most of the ash trees that populated the other streets 15 years ago have been leveled due to emerald ash bore. It's not pretty. But wait, it gets worse. About eight years ago, many of the homeowners jumped on a "good deal" set up by another homeowner that involved the mass annihilation of insects. It's incredible what fear and lack of knowledge can do. This lethal cocktail fueled a Facebook neighborhood sign-up list for quarterly insecticide application on houses, fences, swing sets. ...
Six Tips for Managing Food Allergies on Vacation
Food factors into everything. How we socialize, celebrate, train, relax, connect, vacation. It's the vacation part that scared me most when my daughter, Abigail, was diagnosed in 2016, with Small Intestine Bacterial Overgrowth (SIBO) and allergies to soy, nuts and eggs. We can't fly by the seat of our pants and eat anywhere. Every move requires a plan of attack. While I still approach vacation with a bit of trepidation, I have a better handle on how, who and what to ask when it comes to eating on the road. The key to ensuring that fun is had by all lies in your ability to take the focus off food and make vacation about the experience. Which is exactly how we rolled this summer in Asheville, NC. Pre-Trip Prep Hotels don't work for us. Without a place to store and prepare food, we're ...
Spicy Hot Chocolate for a Chicago Deep Freeze
As I'm writing this, the wind is howling, the furnace hasn't stopped and the current temperature is -26F in the Chicago area. With the wind chill...-47F. Ugh. The dog is resting at my feet in a sweater to which she's reluctantly adjusting and all I can think is how grateful I am that the garden is blanketed with seven inches of snow as we wait this out. Frost quakes, or cryoseisms, have been rattling the garden all morning and seem to have subsided now that the sun's out. Cryoseisms occur when saturated soil endures a massive temperature drop. The soil expands, stressing its surroundings, until the pressure becomes so great that a tiny explosion occurs. While I didn't feel the earth shake, the quake that occurred at 11am was enough to wake my daughter. School's closed for the next few days ...
Egg-Free Oatmeal Cranberry Cookies
When my daughter was diagnosed with SIBO and allergies to eggs, soy and nuts, it quickly became apparent that cookies were a no-no. Gasp! If you find an affordable egg-free cookie that meets the criteria to keep her gut healthy, I'm all ears. Since her diagnosis last year, I've spent a lot of time in the kitchen trying to come up with recipes that were appealing to all of us. What mom has the time to create individual meal plans? And what I found is that it is possible to have an egg-free, relatively healthy cookie that we all can enjoy. I say relatively because butter, flour and sugar are involved, but it's a cookie for crying out loud and the butter's grass-fed, the sugar's brown and the flour is whole wheat. I also added ground flax seed for some nutritional punch in the form of Omega-3 ...
