Life Changes

Isaiah and I are very interested in healthy eating and living. We have slowly made changes in our lives to improve our health and well being. I make almost everything from scratch. We have cut out all sugars, MSG, high fructose corn syrup, and the list goes on. Even with all these changes, we still didn't feel good a lot of the time. There were many evening Isaiah would come home from work and find me laying on the couch trying to survive from a headache or brain fog.

Isaiah started doing some research and started reading about celiac disease. Celiac disease is when a person eats gluten (found in wheat, barley and rye) their body kills off all the villi in their small intestine causing decreased absorption of nutrients and inflammation. The signs and symptoms included what we had been having problems with, so we went and got tested. Well, we are both positive.

What does that mean for us? It means a whole new adventure in cooking. I am learning to make breads, pizza crust, pancakes, and cookies with different grains then wheat. It may be surprising to know that there are lots of grains that don't have gluten in them like: millet, corn, rice, amaranth, quinoa, and soy. So lots of new flavors and experimenting for me in the kitchen.

We have been gluten-free for over a month and feel so much better.

Zoo Fun

We buy a zoo pass every year and go to the zoo all the time, so I thought I would include some fun pictures from our last trip since it is so much a part of our lives.

This trip I actually took all four kids by myself. We had so much fun. I let Benjamin have the camera most of the time and he took pictures of all the animals. I included his two best.

It was really cold that day and Amita ended up being sick. She was a really trooper through. She didn't fuss or whine about not feeling good.

We ate our lunch at a park near by and the kids played for a few minutes, but by then it was so cold we were freezing. So we packed up and headed home.