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Having a kid on a special diet is so hard.  Yes, I did just whine a little. I love food. My kids love food. We particularly love chocolate.  A lot.  A. Whole. Lot.  Especially when it is baked in to that decadent form of gooey goodness we call chocolate chip cookies.  Oh yeah.... To my dismay, all the mainstream chocolate chips have dairy and soy lecithin added. Boo.  Soy lecithin is on the "no no" list for my son and we are limiting dairy.  What when chocolate chip manufacturers thinking when they added an ingredient like soy lecithin to unsuspecting chocolate?  Because the only thing I really know about soy lecithin is that it is an emulsifier and I don't understand the manufacturing process of chocolate chips - I can't answer why they put it in there! LOL....  But, I kept searching the good search and finally found what I was looking for!



Why, YES! You did hear angels singing!

Mini chocolate chips made by Enjoy Life.  They are free. Well, not free dollar wise, but free of a lot of different allergens and stuff.  They are gluten, dairy, peanut, tree nut, soy, egg and casein free.  You would think that a chocolate chip without that stuff would not be a choco-piece-o-heaven, but a choco-piece-o-well.... you know..... not good.  I have to say, I was a bit skeptical (what if they did not melt and I had dry toasty unchocolately goodness?) and the chocolate chips were not cheap by any means, but I bit the bullet and brought home. 

They were AWESOME!  They melted and everything!  They tasted marvelous!  My kids, my husband, and my refined tastesbuds could not tell they were lacking any of those allergens......  That is good!  I can not wait to try these on other things, like in my trail mix recipe!  Woot!

Ok, so here are the details if you want to snag you a bag.  You can buy Enjoy Life chocolate chips in mini chips or chunks. They are available online at The Gluten Free Mall or at your local grocery store for around $5 a bag.  Enjoy Life also has many other products I am excited to try out, like their boom Choco boom chocolate bars. If you click on that link there is currently a coupon for 75 cents off two!  It is worth your time to run over to their website at http://www.enjoylifefoods.com/, and check out their other products.  You may find it makes feeding those on those "free" diets much easier.

When I lay down at night with my husband, I can pretty much count on there being more than the two of us that wake up in our bed.  You know how it is, you are sleeping, content, dreaming; all the stress and wrinkles of the day are melting away. Your body is hard at work making repairs and your brain is busy processing all the day's data, storing it away in our brain files.  

Then I hear it.  The sound of carpet fibers being bent and crushed under little feet.  I hope it is the dog.  But, I know deep down, that it is one of the children.  What do they want.  My brain stops processing the former day's information.  A file or two - particularly the one containing the memory of where I put my car keys, is dropped on my brain floor.  My body stops making repairs, the emerging grey hair, wrinkle, or skin sag will be allowed to continue on it's way to making me look a year or two older than necessary. 

I feel tapping.  I initially try to ignore it.  Maybe if I pretend it is not there, it will go away like your bills.  What child is it?  Is it the littlest one, the typical one who is so sweet to snuggle with still?  She doesn't take up too much space, and the smell of her hair is about as precious as it can be.  That would be okay.  The tapping gets more insistent.  I hear the voice of my six year old daughter.  "Mommy, I am scared, can I sleep with you." 

I say, "Go get your pillow and blanket and you can lay on the floor."  Don't judge me, this child snores like a freight train and coughs every 5 seconds due to her allergies. She is not snuggly. She is all arms and legs and muscle.  She says, "I don't want to sleep on the floor. I want to sleep with you."   I tell her to go around and ask her father.  I am hoping that he tells her the same thing.  Nope.  He hauls her up into the bed and puts her smack dab in the middle.  I am thinking I could have done that, I just did not want to. So now, I get to look like the mean parent.  I am laying there trying to get comfortable with a six year old's knee in my right side, while her coughing threatens to drive me to full insanity, when I hear more feet. 

It is the snuggly one.  She trips over something in the floor and starts to fuss, I tell her to come to me and haul her up in the bed.  She is sleeping on my left side.  I am a mommy sandwich.  I find myself thinking that it could be a long night and briefly consider the sofa, or one of the now empty kid's bed.  I wonder how exactly am I going to extract myself from the bed in the morning without waking one of them up. 

I sorta sleep.  When I wake up in the morning, I flip the 3 year old, who has drooled in my hair, over my body and put her next to her sister.  In the process, I wake the three year up.  Why is it she can stay asleep in the car, at 5 pm, when I don't want her to sleep and we are trying everything to wake her up, but is the lightest sleeper in the world at 7 am?  I wake up a little cranky and she is now asking me to carry her to the livingroom.  I make her walk.  I know I am a mean mommy.  But, I have not even had my first cup of coffee yet. 

I really do try to appreciate all these moments, even when they are hard and I am tired.  I try to remember graciousness and gratefullness, because they really do get big way too fast.  I sit on the sofa, hold my preschooler and drink my coffee.

I will leave you with this.  I have always loved it :) Enjoy!

Today, the weather was beautiful. The sun was warming our tiny part of the earth to just the right temperature, the breeze was barely noticeable, but welcome, and clear skies made everything just look right.  Our city held it's whateverth annual downtown trick or treating event.  After much consideration, and a peptalk courtesy of myself, I decided to take the kids and my mentally handicapped adult brother. 

Let me just say here, that if you called to tell me I won a million dollars, I don't think that my screams of joy and delight would equal that of my kids when I passed on the good news.  I am pretty sure it took me a full 20 minutes to regain my hearing.

I applied make up - no on myself - but on my 3 year old daughter, my 6 year old daughter, my 11 year old daughter, and tried to figure out what I could do to my 6 year old son with my handy dandy dark brown eyeliner pencil.  I could not think of a single thing, so I just combed his hair and helped transform him into Samson, pre the Delilah, blindness, and suicide part.  My girls were made over into Tiana (my single white child), a bride (my 11 yo) and a little girl in a white dress (my 6 yo's words, not mine).  While it was really fun to put mascara on my 3 year old, it wasn't so much on my 11 year old.  I had visions of poking my own eye out with the mascara wand.  She would. NOT. stop. freaking. blinking.  Before any of you decide I am violent or now blind and eyeless, just know that I refrained. So, keep the braille books to yourself - for now. 

I loaded up Samson, Tiana, Bride, Little Girl in a White dress, and Mario (my brother) and headed down town.  On the way, I was giving myself yet another pep talk about how I was going to react should anyone say anything indecorous towards me or my brother when he attempted to procure the free candy by saying the magic words, "trick or treat".  So what he has facial hair, is 5'9" tall, and looks like he is 37 (he is).  He mentally handicapped and I think has probably trick or treated every year for the past 37. It is like, a habit now.  I decided I would just uhm, give them back their candy in a way that left no doubt as to what I thought about them acting like the candy police. 

We arrived downtown and saw throngs of people, and I use that word lightly, people not throngs..... There were witches and dead things, princesses and Jedi knights, and there was an abundance of skin.  Who in the world is the parent that lets their daughters dress up in costumes that I would consider lingerie, or at the very least a fun night at home while the kids are with a sitter.  "Yes honey, I will be red riding hood and you be the big bad wolf." Rawrrr....  Who are the companies that market such costumes to preteen girls?  Is it the same company that decided push up bras and thongs for 8 year olds and preteens were a good idea?  Why are we doing this to our girls?  It is all very disheartening to see that our daughters are being encouraged to find sexiness at such an early age.  How is this going to teach our daughters that they have value and worth because of what is inside their hearts and minds instead of what they have on their bodies?  So stinking frustrating it is....

Besides the initial concern that someone would be rude about my brother trick or treating, the abundance of preteen and teen age skin on display, and losing my 3 year old for a 30 second eternity, it was a fun time!  It was like a test run of the halloween costumes... 

What are your plans?!

*Notes:  These cupcakes are not overly sweet. If you want them sweeter, add less cocoa.  If you do not like the somewhat grainy texture of whole wheat flour, use white (at your own risk of course!).

As a stay at home mom, I have looked around and thought, "What the heck am I doing here. I am not good enough for this. I will never be what I need to be. I will never be able to do what needs to be done."  These types of thoughts are unproductive and only serve to make things worse,  but they are there and often sends me looking for that magical book, list, website, home notebook, box of index cards, or just sends me to the sofa with a bag of chips, a bowl of ice cream and a diet soda.  Does that make me lazy?  Does that bring to light the possiblity that I lack self discipline?  Does this make me a failure at my job?

Seriously?

The Magical Be A Success at Life Mommy Book

"After I get these back to cozy log cabin I built, I will slaughter the deer, smoke the meat and whip a new bonnet."

The idea that those standards would work in our modern world is just silly.  The pioneer typically lived in a one room house, had few clothes, and had a much simpler way of life.  When it was dark, there was no light and everyone quit working, because they could not see. Their days were shorter in that regard.  They also generally did not work on much of anything on Sundays, using that day as a full day of rest.  While Proverbs 31 woman certainly has really good character traits and we should desire to emulate the Biblical qualities she has, she also lived in a very different world.  She sold at shops, bought land, and planted things.  She also had servants, a different set of real estate laws, and did not have to worry much about sales tax, merchant accounts, and Quickbooks.

If evolution were true, this is what I would look like....

Todays modern conveniences, like running water and electricity, have enabled us to have longer and more productive days.  We have to know that people in the way back when, got to turn it off at 6 pm in the winter, and everyone went to bed early because candles and oil were expensive.  They got more rest.  So, if I as a mom, have a longer day of schooling my kids, taking care of them, making meals, have a bigger home with more clothes, dishes, and indoor toilets to clean; I am going to be tired.  Our bodies and our minds will give out on us on occasion.  My most tired times come when my body is preparing for that uhm "special" time of the month that most women get the uhmmm pleasure of experiencing.  I believe this is hormonal for me and other than getting more rest and making sure I am at least trying to get some nutritious food in my body, there is not going to be much else that can fix it.  Call me lazy if you want to, but please avoid the hours of 1 pm and 2 pm.... I will be napping.

Homeschooling is difficult all by itself, but when you throw in a chronic illness, it feels impossible.  On one hand, you want your child to be "normal" and to learn at a normal pace.  When a child is ill, they fall behind and it can be overwhelming.  Then, you have your children who are not ill.  What do you do with them when you are busy with the sickly child or worse, stuck in a hospital. 

I don't have the answers.  But, I do have a child that suffers from an undiagnosed chronic illness, that has landed him in the hospital more than I would like to see.  I hope I can encourage you, as a parent and a teacher, to persevere and offer some helpful suggestions.

1. Pare down your curriculum.  This is not the time to have a very teacher intensive curriculum.  We are Weaver lovers.  But it is very teacher oriented.  I simply can not keep up with it.  I have my older child doing a workbook curriculum and my younger kids are doing computer based phonics. We use Click n Kid Phonics and Starfall.  We also use Math U See.  The video teaches the lesson, and my 6 year old only needs minimal assistance after that.

2. Lower your expectations of yourself as a homeschooling parent.  It is a great goal to want to read the entire set of Little House on the Prairie books, but if your child's illness will not permit him to be up for extended periods of time, or if you are too busy holding his hand while he is vomiting, you may not be able to accomplish this.  It is ok.  Sometimes I spend the majority of my day cleaning up after my sick child and nothing else really gets done. 

3. Lower your expectations of your children. The entire family will feel the stress of having an ill child in the home.  They need time to come to terms with this and with the fact that your attention will seem unfairly divided sometimes.  This is likely to cause some acting out.  When this happens, it is not a good time to ask about their math lesson.  This is the time to hand out extra hugs and love.

4. Read a lot of unschooling blogs and/or books.  This really helped me.  I was able to see how parents managed to raise children who still all learned to read, all learned to do basic math, and all still enjoyed learning.  I also got lots of ideas about how to promote an attitude and spirit of learning in my home. 

5. Involve education in your child's daily life.  Leave down the scissors, colors, paper, and glue.  Play eduational videos from netflix and your library. Listen to audio books. I have been surprised at how much my kids have picked up simply by watching Sid the Science kid.  Thanks to him, even my 3 year old knows what a hypothesis is......

6. Let your children play together without everything turning into "school".  Your kids need each other.  They need to be able to play with your ill child and your ill child needs to be able to play with them.  My son has had several good weeks.  He is currently having some issues.  The good weeks, I let him play.  We did a little school, but mostly he got to run and jump and play. He learned to roller skate with his sister. They wrestled and colored together.  Should I have been "doing school" or should I have just let him feel good for a little while?  I opted for the latter.  Should my child die from his illness, I will rest easy knowing that he got to be a kid.

7.  Ignore the naysayers. No one knows what your life and day is like except you. Follow your instinct.

Above all, be patient as your family learns how to navigate these waters.