A Moment with Kraft Poison and Cheese.

I know you may be wondering why I am devoting space to this cause when it is something I will never allow Slim to have, even if they remove the shit. We just don't do much processed and then there's the whole wheat/gluten thing. Doubt we'll ever get that back. And even if we do, I own a pasta machine and mine is soooo much better. However that is me. 

See if you can follow my logic for a second. You are here because you stumbled here perhaps. Maybe you want to change things for your family. Maybe you just want to watch my slow descent into madness. That's okay, pull up a chair, pop some non-GMO corn (look for Amish popcorn... sooo good) and settle back. But for every one of us that is conscious of what we put in our bodies and our children's bodies, how many are out there that don't pay any attention? How many little two year olds are scooping with fingers and rubbery sporks yellow poison from their Ikea bowls (yep, I had a set too) into their grinning mouths? Then tapping their little fingers together in baby signs more, more, more. How many day care centers believe they are serving good whole food because they are using a brand name and not a giant food supplier brand? And how many generic labels does Kraft supply? 

So, do it for the kids that are innocently fed Kraft Macaroni & Cheese. And do it because every petition that  brings the dangers in our foods attention is worthy of your moment and your name. 

http://www.change.org/petitions/kraft-stop-using-dangerous-food-dyes-in-our-mac-cheese

Traveling Fool

This past weekend, for the first time since going on program (I can't really think of another way of putting it) we had to travel. Yep. Hotels, restaurants, extended family, and many, many miles in the car with potty stops winding us through rows of convenience store shit-food aisles just to pee. Four big days touring Temptation Nation. For a funeral. And a birthday. *sigh*

No matter how much I can try to prepare, no matter how much I battle, without the involvement of the entire tribe, we're gonna go off program. And its going to suck. And family is going to judge and claim to your face that they aren't. And Slim is going to bust a bottle of beer on a curb in the cemetery in front of family friends and I'm gonna want to go ahead and take a dirt nap right there. I mean literally, I was two feet from my spot in the family plot.

And it's all going to happen while I am trying to mourn my father, support my mother, deal with my sisters, and the feeling that I have to plan it all because no one else will ever step up to the plate. And family before you start saying its not true, I ask you, what did you bring to the service?

Don't forget to throw it altogether into the mixing bowl of my hometown, which frankly depresses the shit out of me. Especially since I didn't have time to see any of my old friends that live there and that's the only damned thing that makes that hell hole palatable.

See everyone feels so bad for Slim that they all want to find him something he can have, even though none of what they got for him, including me, was on program at all. Right now, we can not have any sugars. Period. That means no fruit. Sorry. It just does. Doesn't saving his life suck? Yep.

So I start thinking. Slim's Grandma's birthday is this weekend. Someone's going to be baking a cake. Slim cannot have cake. So what do I do, I make him cookies. (These cookies contain bananas and apples, but everything else in them is currently on program.) Yep. I bake them in secret on Thursday. And then Slim's Meme (his other grandmother) buys him dehydrated fruit chips for snacks. And Daddy goes to Grandma's birthday, but when the cake comes out, he takes Slim to his aunt's house so that he doesn't have to watch everyone eat cake. But then he comes back over and gives Slim a piece "without frosting" because he feels bad.

And Slim, he enjoyed forbidden fruit all weekend because the adults in his life have guilt issues.

The Denial Highway, Without Seatbelts

Last year, with Slim struggling in the first grade and before we went on the Daytrana patch, I hit the ol' world wide web to search for some ideas. I hit on the Feingold Diet Program and wham! It all seemed to make sense. I mean THESE PEOPLE UNDERSTOOD!  I quickly joined and when my Shopper's Guide came in the mail, I began to clean out the pantry.

The Feingold Program eliminates many nasty bad boys from the diet. Most of these things are artificial colors, artificial preservatives, artificial sweeteners, and artificial flavorings. It is an excellent program with a wonderful support network and I am not doing it justice here. So please, if you are interested, go take a look around their website. Watch the videos, read the overviews, and give it a shot. They are really wonderful and I would not be where I am now or have the courage to try these things myself without them.

We had pretty good success on Feingold. We were slapping the Daytrana on his ass every morning and packing the lunchbox with approved breads, sandwich meats, cheeses, and chips. An approved cookie would dunk into organic milk on the occasional evening. We did well enough that his after school program commented on how wonderful he was acting. Slowly, as summer came on us and trouble eased, we slipped away from the program. One. Meal. At. A. Time. Oh, it's so easy to do.

We never tried to cut back Slim's medication on the Feingold Diet. We were just too afraid. I also never pushed the gluten-free/casein-free option. And things were okay so we kind of cruised along the denial highway.

The little voice inside my head had a few issues with Feingold. My biggest complaint is that the Shopper's Guide is full of processed food and sugar. I can remember gagging my little voice, wrapping her in a rug, and tossing her in a dark closet. 

The denial highway dumped us out behind the portable buildings that housed a whole lot of don't give a damn second grade teachers. In the cactus. We're all still picking prickles out of our asses. 

A Pharmaceutical F*ck You

This is Slim. Slim is currently 8 years old and paroled from school on bad behavior. Wait, not his bad behavior, he's an angel. Well, no, not quite, but it was bad behavior all the way around the spectrum: his behavior, my behavior, his father's behavior, his doctor's behavior, and the school's behavior.

As I get further into the blog and the Saving Slim process, I'll go further back in time and try to piece it all together for you. If you've got the stomach for it. If I have the stomach for it. But for now, I'll pick it up in Kindergarten, just two years ago.

Due to his fidgeting and lack of focus, Slim was having issues in Kindergarten. Then his ego tanked and he was convinced that Santa Claus wouldn't bring anything for him because he was a bad kid. Gut wrenching, I went to a parent/teacher conference with Slim's forty year kindergarten veteran teacher. Go talk to your doctor, she said. He'll just make sure everything is okay.

So off to our trusted physician we went. Together we tried to find the right medication for Slim. When he ran out of ideas a year later, he sent us to the local ADD/ADHD pediatrician guru. We were given the Daytrana patch.

Fast forward another year. I make an appointment to see the doc. I plead my case that Slim is getting 1s and 2s in class (the rank is 1 for monster, 4 for good, and 5 for leader) and has turned aggressive. I am told that it is common for kids who take medication to have ODD, Oppositional Defiance Disorder. I asked, "Don't we just call that side effects?" And off I was shooed with a prescription to soothe the beast that the Daytrana had honed.

So, we have the Daytrana patch (which isn't called the Ritalin patch because some parents won't use Ritalin, cause you know, it might have a bad wrap, but is the same medication: methylphenidate) and now a prescription for night time that is guanfacine (Tenex or Intuniv).

I politely took the prescriptions, paid my bill, flipped the bird as I drove out of the parking lot, and decided to save Slim myself. It's what I should have been doing all along.