Sugar rhymes with Booger

This diet sucks. Five times a day I feel like the dad from A Christmas Story when the Bumpus dogs come tearing through the house and destroy the turkey. Or when Ralphie says, "Ooohhh fuuuudge," except he doesn't really say "oh fudge" he says THE word, the big one, the queen-mother of dirty words, the "F-dash-dash-dash" word! Or when...I could quote that movie all day, except I can't because I have to go harvest some quinoa and ferment some tofu because that's all we can eat around here. We can't have wheat, dairy, yeast, vinegar, or sugar. Which leaves us with basically, rye crackers and cat crap.

What can we eat? We can eat all meats except pork as long as they're not processed meats. Which isn't a big deal because the only "processed" meats we eat come from Whole Foods and are nitrate- and sulphite-free. Except that E "can't like no meat" lately. He likes dippy eggs, but only the yolk and not really enough to sustain him, and I can't have eggs at all since they bother B.

We can't have any dairy. No butter, cheese, yogurt or other sources of protein, so that's rough. I've been mostly dairy-free since B was born since it seems to bother her and E's been mostly dairy-free his whole life since it definitely bothers him, but he would eat hard cheeses, goat's milk yogurt, and cream cheese in his sushi, but no more.

We can eat all vegetables. Sweet. Two-and-a-half year olds LOOOOOVVVVE vegetables. And E used to really like salad but has been kind of eh with salads lately. Maybe that's because our salad dressings all taste like ass.

We can eat rice, rye, quinoa, amaranth, corn, basically all the gluten-free flours and grains that are gaining popularity in this crazy, mixed up food world. I wonder if they make GF croissants? Hmmm...croissants.

Oh, and get this. We can eat as many chips and french fries as we want! Yippee! If it's good enough for the Irish, it's good enough for us.

We can drink very few things. Water and flavored water as long as it doesn't have any sweetners. We can drink any of the different fake milks, like rice and soy milk, but I worry about too much soy and rice milk tastes like...rice milk. So we bought hemp milk, the vanilla-flavored unsweetened kind, and E will drink it straight. I was surprised by and impressed with hemp milk, and it's definitely good enough to pour on cereal. And we can drink Oogave soda, which is actually pretty good. At least the root beer is. Haven't tried any of the other flavors, but I'm actually looking forward to it and assuming we come out of this fucking diet alive, I'll probably stick to the agave soda for good.

Now, other than not being able to eat or drink anything, what makes this diet so difficult is that everything has sugar in it. I'll repeat that. EVERYTHING. HAS. SUGAR. IN. IT. Spaghetti sauce you say? Yup. Salad dressings? Yup. Super healthy $5 a box crackers that promsie sunshine and happiness if you eat them? Yup! Gluten-free hippie fish sticks shaped like little fish have sugar in them. EVERYTHING DOES!!! So with a two-and-a-half year old who is sick (and sick and tired after not having many food choices after only a week on the diet) and a three month old baby who insists on having needs (how dare she?!?) I have to cook everything from scratch and learn to cook GFCF (gluten-free/casein-free) which never involves less than a dozen different ingredients, including about 6 different kinds of flours.

So, yeah. I'm not bitter at all. Actually, I'm not bitter as much as I'm frustrated and sad. E opened the fridge the other day with D standing behind him asking him what he wants to eat and E said, "There is no food for E in here." Heartbreak.

The bright side? Assuming this diet works, E will be cured of his digestive malaise. He will have normal poops, not have constant heartburn, not drool like a teething 6 month old and maybe even put on a few pounds. So we're doing it. D even voluntarily ventured out to the Asian supermarket and walked up and down the aisles reading labels and trying to find things we can eat. What a good dad. And now that I've vented about it, I'll start putting up all the good things we've found. D found a really good GFCF website and little by little I'm building up an arsenal of recipes that hopefully E will learn to love. If not, then chips and a hotdog for breakfast, lunch and dinner never killed anybody. Right?