Many Chapters Later....

   It's late on a Wednesday night (nearly Thursday morning, actually) and I am at my kitchen sink, washing a mound of dishes that accumulated throughout the day.  I am tired, lonely, and sore.  I am also thankful.  

    I used to think of such emotions and feelings as contradictory.  I thought that I had to be all thankful, or all sad, or all lonely, or all content.  I pushed myself to be thankful for things that I can honestly say I am thankful for now and my life is much harder than it ever was.  I used to read blogs and feel guilty that I needed to force myself to have gratitude for hard things--things that I might see as easy now in comparison.  That has been my journey, one I know my spirit desperately needed to take--and boy has it been taken for a ride!

    I can remember 2012 dimly.  (That's when I wrote this blog's first post.  I kept it because I feel it stands for something.  We'll get there.)  I started that year reading a blog post from Passionate Homemaking about gratitude.  I don't know how I came upon it.  Maybe I found it on Facebook.  I was struggling because our family had been living a special needs life for several year at this point.  I don't think we had yet come to term with being "special needs," but we were.  I had a precious six-year-old, hereafter referred to as "Little Bear," who had once been nearly typical a few years previously, but was far from "typical" these days.  He was already diagnosed with Type 1 Diabetes and soon would be diagnosed with Asperger's Syndrome, CNSD, ADHD, and OCD.  He was struggling with severe anxiety, chemical and food sensitivities that would quickly fill any chart, tantrums and terrible mood swings.  My once preciously chill boy was now high strung and volatile.  Little Bear was falling apart.  Our beautiful little Darling Do immediately posed challenges with her sleep troubles, curious and creative demanding spirit, and clear food sensitivities.  I had started having miscarriages--the first of a string of eight that would mark the next two years. My husband was working late nights while I spent my time cooking, cleaning, trying to bless my two littles while also losing babies, and homeschooling.   Life. Was. Hard.  It was.  No arguing about it.  Nevertheless, I needed a change of attitude.

    We are going to fast forward a few years, almost four as we are nearing the closing days of 2015.  Wow.  I am not even going to say it....   I would say life is harder now in some ways.  We have made a ton of progress in the last four years.  I can say we are on a healing path now and I could not really say that about then.  We had too many detours and roadblocks to encounter.  But now we are nearly seven years into special needs, four years into special diets, four years into losing eight precious babies to Heaven, four years into letting go of family meals out, fun trips to the fair, afternoon visits to the mall pretzel stand to just catch our breath and have fun.  I miss those things....  However, now we have perspective, and that is a good thing.  A God thing. God promises to bring about hope, joy, a perfecting of spirit in our trials, in all those ups and downs of a sometimes roller coaster life.  Ours has been nothing short of seriously dippy coaster ride.  The difference between 2012 and 2015?  I am learning joy.     

     So tonight I was pushed to the point of blogging.  Because I am lonely. Because I know that other moms, other Christian moms of special needs kids are lonely, too.  They are standing at their kitchen sinks crying over dirty dishes but so thankful for the faces that were fed by the food still crusting the plates. They are dog-tired but staying up late to try and find a blog that might connect them with others out there who are struggling as well.  They are trying to make friends and not really sure how because there is so much hurt, disappointment, and complication to this special needs life.  They just need somewhere to connect.  I am praying this might be the start of something that can help someone out there.  I am praying that I might find a little more healing along the way.  This broken heart has many wounds to bind.

     My story will take a while.  I hope to start sharing over the course of the coming days.  Late nights when the kids are quiet and my hard working husband has already crashed, I will trek to the keyboard to bang out my tale. This leg of the journey demands companions.  Maybe we will meet along the way.

A Tale of Four Bears and How they Discovered Real Food

Just today, Mama Bear has been busy in the kitchen--getting a batch of bone broth simmering, baking up a lightly honey sweetened peach cobbler with coconut flour, cooking up grassfed beef burgers on the griddle.  This is a day in my life these days.  Oh, and did I mention caring for my two littles, my sweet and challenging nearly six year old boy and my full of spunk two year old girl while babysitting my nephew?  And I took care of my house, too.

This was not always my life.  I used to try to cut corners wherever I could so that I would have plenty of time to spend with my little bears during the day and then together with dear Papa Bear when he arrived home from work.  I'm a homeschooling mama so this means I'm already pretty busy.  The kitchen was the easiest place to cut corners--so I did.  I couldn't figure a way around the already long list of daily chores that stacked up on top of the requirements of mothering and home education.  And then there was my own sewing hobby that I dreamed of squeezing back in someday.

Two years ago, though, I found myself at a crossroads in the kitchen.  So we are going to back up a bit from today and take a look at life in my world back then.

Something had changed with my son, Sugarbear, around the time our sweet daughter, Bearbug,  entered the world.  He was four years old that summer and he'd been throwing tantrums for about six months at this point.  We always knew God broke our Sugar Bear's mold when he created him, but the quirks were picking up a bit.  His sensitivity to loud noises, overwhelm in crowds and bouts of hyperkinesis were on the rise.   We had started preschool and I was having increasing difficulty holding his attention.   He was a lot more high strung than he used to be and, as the list of concerns continued to mount,  I felt a tug at my heart to start really looking into the issue of nutrition.  Sugarbear had been losing weight that year, too.  I didn't have it documented yet, but I could just tell.  He didn't look right.  And sweet Bearbug had horrible cradle cap, woke often with night terrors and was generally difficult to get to sleep.  Exhausting.

I started searching around on the internet for ways to afford wholesome, real food without spending a fortune.  I happened upon news about open enrollment for a local buying club where one could get access to farm fresh milk, pastured eggs and meats, and organic produce.  I quickly realized I would not be saving money when I saw the pricelist, but by that point I knew money was the less important matter.  I had been introduced to Sally Fallon's Nourishing Traditions, Michael Pollan's Omnivores Dilemma, and the documentary about our screwed up food system, Food, Inc.   "Because in much wisdom there is much grief, and in increasing knowledge there is much pain." (Ecclesiastes 1:18)  My eyes were opened and I was devastated.  As soon as dear husband hopped on board, I started transitioning our family toward a completely different way of eating.  This was not just about our family anymore.

Nevertheless, old habits die hard.  I had always thought of myself as a fairly healthy eater.  I think many of us Americans eating the Standard American Diet think we eat just fine.  I mean, we ate our fruits and vegetables--sure maybe not five or six servings a day but we ate them.  I cooked a lot from scratch--using a can of cream of chicken here and there--but I wasn't just always cooking from a box.   I bought organic milk and fed my kids fruit leathers for snack.  Here's the problem.  I really had no idea where my food was coming from nor did I understand much about true nourishment.

As I learned, I began bringing home fresh, living raw milk instead of ultra pasteurized, completely dead organic milk.  Pastured eggs fresh from the farm replaced the game of salmonella roulette in the fridge.  I discovered that CAFO farmed chickens were laced with antibiotics, arsenic, and an entire host of pathogens.  No thank you.  I said "bye-bye" to the e.coli (the pathogenic variety) that used to visit our house in the form of CAFO beef.  "Hello" grassfed beef!  So those were the changes that I made immediately.  A good start, right?

Here's the rub--I simply could not let go of many of my old habits: cereal in the mornings; cooking with canned soups; doling out packaged foods for snacks like crackers, pretzels, and goldfish; cooking up boxes of mac and cheese and frozen chicken nuggets.  I was filling up our bodies with dead foods when they were screaming for nourishment.  In the meantime, my son was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes and that brought even more confusion into my kitchen.  Sugar substitutes like aspartame (yuck!) and splenda (ick!) found a home in my cabinets and refrigerator.  Looking back, I want to cringe, but I know that I was just scared and overwhelmed.  Grace.

What ended the madness, then?  Fast forward a year into the future after Sugarbear's diagnosis (yes, ironically, he was nicknamed "Sugarbear" in his first week of life, 4 1/2 years before his type 1 diagnosis...) and you will find this Mama Bear crying in the kitchen floor, declaring that I didn't know how I could continue.  My son's first year with diabetes has left us completely confused.  During this time, his doctors associated the aforementioned behavioral problems with his diabetes.  We had started to live with this notion that things would not get better for him.  He would be tied to a life of moodiness and insulin dependence.  But then I started to notice something.  As we journeyed that year, I started to let go of things that his nutritionists and doctors had told us to feed him--diet sodas, glucose tabs colored with artificial colorings and loaded with artificial flavors, sugar free candies with various fake sweeteners.  The less of this junk he ate, the better he behaved.  I noticed this by God's grace.  We stopped giving him diet sodas just toward the end of that year when I got sick of the garbage he was ingesting.  His tantrums stopped happening daily and spread out quite a bit.  Then I noticed one day that his behavior was getting worse AFTER he was treated for a low with glucose tabs.  I switched to sugar and I discovered that his behavior improved just like it should when the low was treated.  Now, all of this did not add up in my head right away but I was getting there.

Now we go back to that day when I was crying in the kitchen floor.  This was two months after I experienced a natural miscarriage and my littles' behavior and sleep patterns had spiraled out of control during this time.  I had cleaned up our eating completely a month before I got pregnant and then when my pregnancy lasted just 2 1/2 months, I threw my hands into the air and said, "Who cares?  It's not like healthy eating kept me from miscarrying."  Bad idea....  My Sugarbear's tantrums started happening daily--sometimes numerous times a day--and my Bearbug started fighting sleep every night.  She'd always struggled off and on, but this was ridiculous.  It was not unusual for her to be awake until 11 p.m. at this point.

Then my dear rockin' Papa Bear told me to check into going gluten free.  When I called him crying that morning, he reached the point that he was willing to do anything for the little bears, and ultimately for the family, to get better.  While simply "gluten free" did not turn out to be the answer, it was the straw that broke the compromising camel's back.  I inadvertently weeded out artificials when I avoided stopping at fast food joints and made our road food from scratch and shopped at Trader Joe's for a road trip to see my parents--and, magically, my little bears behaved like a dream!  I prayed off and on the entire 12 hour drive asking for guidance and answers and, while I didn't arrive at our destination just yet, I at least found a place to rest my feet for a little while.  Saying goodbye to the artificial ingredients and eating whole, real food 100% of the time would keep us going for a little while.  Little did I know just how far we had yet to go.