1 Year Anniversary of celiac diagnosis

We are celebrating the 1 year anniversary of Asha's celiac diagnosis. Yes, you read that right "celebrating"! Of course, given the choice, I don't think anyone would choose to have celiac, but we celebrate Asha's health and wellness and having the information to improve her everyday life. We are also celebrating the fact that we are much more knowledgeable and that that knowledge has made life feel easier living with celiac disease.

There are 2 things that I have noticed that this year of eating gluten free has brought us. One feels like both a gift and a curse. Asha's reaction to getting glutened is now very obvious and more severe. This could also be a result of her getting older and therefore better at communicating what she feels. Before going GF the first sign of trouble was her behaviour and then she would have nondescript tummy aches that seemed to come and go at random times. Now she gets fairly severe and very localized stomach pain within an hour of getting any gluten and the behaviour/emotional trauma comes later. On the flip side she does seem to have an understanding of why it is happening and we have developed some tools to help us all through it. Te gift of the stomach pain is that it helps us to figure out what caused the glutening with more accuracy. The curse, of course, is that nobody wants to experience pain and feeling helpless when your baby is hurting is torturous for a mama!

When she begins to melt down, get mean and feel lost in a confusing gluten-colored world, she will often be the first to say, "I think I had some gluten". At which point just the acknowledgment that her feeling so out of whack and "yucky" is caused by something outside of her seems to help her find her barrings. When that happens she finds it helpful to remove herself from interaction with friends or siblings and do something quiet like watch a favorite movie or sit with me on the couch with a stack of books to read. She also finds a warm bath with baking soda helpful. Often she takes small plastic animals in the tub with her and plays quietly for a good long time. During these episodes I have found it easiest to make her world feel like a protective nest where she doesn't need to make any decisions and I make an extra effort to provide her with the things that I know she likes and often lots of quiet cuddling.

The other side of having been GF for a year now is that I find we can easily become complacent relying on past info about products instead of being ever diligent in reading labels and looking for changes in product ingredients or processing practices. We are about to run her blood work again and I am curious to see her numbers as it feels like lately she has been glutened quite a bit. This is difficult for me as I am still ultimately responsible and I could esily melt into a guilt ridden mommy monster.
Instead I am choosing to rededicate myself to diligent label reading and product checking and am planning a giant overhaul of the kitchen to look for ways she may be getting sick from cross contamination. I often wish that the other non GFers in the house would be willing to make our house GF, but since none of them wants that I need to double my efforts to safeguard Asha and recomit to making more GF alternatives available that everyone can enjoy. Dinners here are and always will be GF, but I am feeling ready to find more ways to make GF "sexy" to the whole crew which will also make Asha's choices more varied and interesting.