You Time-Travel in My Heart

Sometimes grief strikes in the most unexpected time or place. Just something makes you miss someone in a specific way that makes your stomach knot; because unlike missing someone who goes on vacation or gets a job out of town, you know that you just have to keep missing your person.

My person is my god brother, Andy. He and I were brought up together as babies. Our moms were pregnant together. His grandma babysat us. Our older sisters were best friends and obnoxiously made us get "married" over and over in ceremonies they'd officiate. He was my first and oldest friend.

A few Octobers ago he lost a battle with mental illness. Anyone who knows someone struggling with mental illness, especially bipolar disorder, knows that it's a dirty fight. Because how can you fight yourself so fiercely without painful consequences? His suicide cut one of the lines that tethered me to a nebulous concept of "this is who I am." Reconnecting with him had always been a touchstone of security and reassurance, no matter how long it had been between conversations.

This is the letter I wrote to him tonight. Because I miss him unexpectedly sometimes. Like when you were a kid and saw your teacher at the grocery store and got sort of confused and shocked, like, "What are you doing at the store?" So I wrote about it. To Andy.

---------

To Andy:

It's definitely self-serving, but I like to draw on your memory whenever I need to feel "un-judged" recently. Like, I know there are things you would just laugh with me about instead of giving a disapproving cringe (like being so exhausted that I mistook one tube for another and started moisturizing my face with Thomas the Tank Engine toothpaste, or having the baby wear the same onesie for 3 days in a row because... it just kinda happened). 

I know I could share those things with you and then we'd both laugh and possibly even have a new inside joke about the curative properties of kids' toothpaste on the skin. And I miss that. 

And sometimes just knowing that you cared for me unconditionally before you died is enough, because miraculously, you loved so hard that it's like there's still some left and I can feel it years later. But sometimes it's not enough. It just aches. Like driving past a house where I used to live and having it feel simultaneously familiar and foreign. And the foreignness hurts. Knowing that I can never again envelop myself in the homey-ness and safety I once felt there, because everything that made it feel like "home" and "mine" isn't there anymore. And you'd get that, too. It's that kind of ache. Something so familiar that you can no longer access the same way. 

So I think about you. And you time-travel in my heart until I get to see you again.

- Me

A Few Good Breakfasts. Gluten Free and Feingold Friendly!

Since diving into this strange, new diet plan here are some of the breakfast foods I've devised.

- Plain old eggs with salt and pepper

- Plain Greek Yogurt from Kirkland (Costco) topped with:

   * Kashi's Simply Maize Organic Corn Cereal 

   * Feingold friendly fruits like: banana and mango

   * or mixed with JIF creamy peanut butter

- Kashi's Simply Maize cereal with milk

- Hodgson Mill's Buckwheat Creamy Hot Cereal topped with
  * Feingold friendly fruits like: banana and mango
  * Brown sugar

- Envirokidz's Peanut Butter Panda Puffs cereal with milk

- Your choice of gluten free, preservative free bread with Earth Balance Organic Coconut Spread or JIF.
  * Honestly, I haven't found a very great GF, preservative free, dye free, etc. bread yet... Maybe because I love real bread so much? But the coconut spread is pretty darn good anyhow. Just keep it on your radar.

- Baked pears and bananas by themselves, over GF toast, or on the buckwheat hot cereal
  * Preheat oven to 400F
  * Place halved pears face-down on a baking sheet and bake for about 15 minutes OR until the skin starts to wrinkle/pucker.
  * Slice bananas, brush with melted coconut spread or butter, bake on a sheet for 10 minutes or until they look smooshy and sweet enough for your liking. You can also cook banana slices in a pan, 1 minute on each side.

Have more ideas? Share them below!

Our Feingold, Gluten-Free Diet Plan... AKA: Are there actual foods we can still eat?

    It's been evident for some time that P has more energy and sleeps way less than the average toddler. Literally, every--single--time we go out with him, he's tearing around at full speed and someone comments, "Wow! He's sure gonna' sleep well tonight!"... and he almost never does. He just goes and goes. That alone wouldn't have convinced me to change our diets so drastically, but more recently this was also accompanied by steep mood swings beyond normal Terrible Twos. He's gotten out of control crying, or sometimes raging, to the point that he almost seems scared. Another red flag: he can lie awake for 2 or 3 hours in his bed without going to sleep. Just crying, tossing, turning, calling out for a million things. Then when he wakes up, he's a wreck--more crying and screaming, often for upwards of 30  minutes.

     His pediatrician brought up going gluten free, but only after trying a few other things. The other things fell flat, i.e., I didn't notice a difference. So after toying with the idea of diet change for a while, I bit the bullet and dove in. I hit Trader Joe's and thought I'd find all these great gluten-free (GF) foods. I was a little overwhelmed and asked an employee for help, at which point I told him what the GF diet was for. He alerted me to the Feingold Diet, originally called the Kaiser Permanente Diet or KP Diet. It's intended to address ADHD behaviors (which the TJ employee said all but disappeared in his 7 year-old son on the diet), but can also help with sleep issues, perseverating, and some other things I saw happening with P that time-outs and patience hadn't done boo to remedy.

     The nuts and bolts of the Feingold Diet are to cut out artificial dyes, artificial flavors, and certain artificial preservatives, and foods containing salicylates (a compound that occurs naturally in certain foods) like apples, grapes, fresh pineapple, berries, tomatoes, peppers, oranges, tangerines, cucumbers, almonds, apricots, pickles... you really need to look up the comprehensive list. There are different stages. During Stage 1, you eliminate all of the foods on the list, then after a period of one to two weeks you integrate the foods back one at a time and hopefully get some of them back into your diet if there are no adverse reactions.

     So after some research on that, I decided that I would rather try both diets (GF and Feingold) at once just in case there were multiple food factors affecting him. Then after a few weeks I could try integrating some of the foods back into his diet. The learning curve is STEEP, which is why I'm going to keep a record of the things I'm feeding P on this diet. So stay tuned as I post those soon!

     Disclaimer: I'm not an expert. I'm not a nutritionist. I'm probably not doing this 100% correctly. If you are an expert at going gluten free or using the Feingold Diet, and you notice that I list some food that's not in line with those diets, go ahead and let me know! Also, before you try any diet change for your own child, consult with your child's pediatrician.

Throwing stars are not appropriate for court

Or so I hear.

I got a jury summons just before we moved across the country this summer, so I couldn't do my civic duty that time BUT I still had to go through the whole process of registering. Of course I immediately had to explain that I couldn't actually serve, but that's beside the point.

Key here is that I had to get oriented to the process regardless. In Los Angeles they are pretty thorough in describing some of the things you may not bring with you to the jury box. Now that we're settled in the new house, I'm posting what I thought was pretty good stuff. Without further ado, my favorites:
- Bicycle parts
- Rollerblades
- Rope that is longer than 2 inches
- Safety pins that are longer than 2 inches
- Flashlights that are longer than 3 inches
- Tools that are longer than 3 inches
- Grafitti tools
- Belt buckles resembling actual firearms
- Swords / cane swords
- Tape measures
-  Stun guns