I never thought I would create a blog.  And that’s also not the main purpose of this site. However, while my husband and I are learning how to create our website including collecting data to make it worth while, I thought it made sense to put something out there.

As parents all you want is for your children to be happy and healthy.  Our daughter is amazing (so is our son but this site isn’t about him).  She’s extremely smart, sweet, silly, kind and happy – most of the time.  Going to the bathroom has always been a struggle for her.  When she was a baby we mixed prune juice in with her oatmeal although her pediatrician wasn’t concerned.  We potty trained her pretty early, at 23 months.  She handled it really well except started withholding her bowel movements, not an uncommon issue with potty training.  She was on and off laxatives as instructed by her doctor.  When she was 3 and we were still having issues we went to a gastro who gave us a new plan with the laxatives.  We followed his instructions and it worked for a while and then she would revert back to her old ways.  My husband and I made our own plans.  When she turned 4, we took her to a different gastro in the same practice who agreed it was withholding issues, gave us a new plan that we felt more confident with but also suggested we have her blood drawn just in case.   We weren’t worried, even forgot to follow up to find out her results, except when we did, her blood tested high for Celiac disease.  I couldn’t believe it, I immediately felt extreme guilt for not realizing something was wrong, I questioned myself for being a working mom, but mostly I worried about my daughter.  She had an endoscopy to confirm the diagnosis and I read everything I could to figure out what we needed to do next.

We decided not to have a gluten free household (at least not for now) so instead I re-organized our kitchen.  We have a gluten free shelf in our pantry with way too much food and a separate area for her new Frozen plastic dishes and new cooking utensils.  I bought a pink pot/pan set for her, a pink dishtowel, a new sponge/spongeholder and a new pink cutting board (can you tell my daughter likes pink?)

This part was actually less overwhelming than I would have thought.  Once I re-organized I  started to feel better.  Thankfully our local supermarket has a lot of gluten free options and our daughter has been more understanding than I could have hoped for.  She knows to ask before she eats anything and 99% of the time she doesn’t get upset when the answer is no.  However the part we’re still struggling with is knowing what to do when a food has gluten free ingredients yet isn’t labeled as gluten free.  Right now whenever we come across something she wants that doesn’t have the label, we either google and search through sites in order to find the answer, or call the company to find the answer.

Depending on the product this process is either really simple or sometimes rather difficult.  We started keeping a list of foods she likes, whether or not they’re gluten free, and some additional notes.  This way we hopefully won’t need to keep repeating the same process, all we need to do is go to our list.  If we’re able to do it, we’d love for this site to become the place where you can go to search for your or your child’s favorite foods.