Celiac Disease Sealed Our Fate

We used to be simple, happy folks living on a farm in Iowa. No real worries, no great consciousness of the world outside of our own. And then our daughter got sick. When she was about 18 months old we started to notice that nine diapers out of ten had diarrhea in them. This had happened periodically off and on for a while, but now it was becoming consistent. My son had had the same problem as a kid for a while and we had been to the doctor with him. Finally determined that it was maybe a milk allergy or giardia or something to that effect. Anyway, I had taken him off milk for a while and tried to disguise the horrid taste of the Metronidazole that they had me give him in maple syrup and, low and behold, he got better and grew up relatively normally. But not Mara. She continued to have diarrhea, and loose weight. I remember many nights walking into her room and she would be standing, crying in her crib with horrible diarrhea all over her P.J.s and then she started vomiting as well. She was a quiet kid. She really didn't do much more than sit and quietly look at books, which was nice for me because I was 8 months pregnant with her younger sister and in the pregnancy fog didn't notice how serious Mara's condition was until sometime after the birth of this fifth child. One day I was changing her shirt and pulled it up as she was facing away from me. Her spine and shoulder blades stuck out alarmingly and her belly protruded out front. She looked like an Ethiopian baby that was starving to death. I thought she wasn't eating enough so we started counting calories and feeding her Pediasure. I made an appointment with our family doctor who noted that she was "failing to thrive" which basically means she had stopped growing like she should have. She did blood work and found that she was anemic with iron deficiency anemia. We started a month long course of giving her iron daily, which was an incredible struggle because it tasted so bad. After a month of that, more blood work. This poor child didn't even cry when she was stuck with needles - she was too weak....I cried, but she didn't. Still anemic. You can imagine my horror, night after night watching my baby getting sicker and sicker. I would lie in her bed with her at night to read her a book and simply cry. All the medical knowledge that I had could do nothing for her except to keep after the medical profession to figure it out. I envisioned lymphoma or leukemia, I envisioned all sorts of horrors that my mind would race over at night long after I should have been sleeping. Thankfully, our family doctor had the foresight to order a screening test for celiac disease and it came back alarmingly high. Celiac disease. Wheat intolerance......who knew? Right? Now, technically, she hasn't been officially diagnosed with celiac because to do that you need to have small intestinal biopsies. I wasn't going to wait around for the month that it was going to be before she could get into the specialist, I took her off wheat immediately which isn't easy in a house of crackers and pasta. I went to the local grocery store knowing essentially nothing about what I was looking for, only that I had to avoid all things that contain wheat, rye, and barley. No graham crackers (her favorite), no bread, no saltines, no oatmeal (because that is typically milled in the same facility as wheat and is therefore contaminated), no noodles, no mac'n cheese, no...... I stood in the isles of the grocery store and I started crying. I couldn't envision a world in which my pasta noodle loving, graham cracker eating kid would have to now live. I slobbered and sniffed my way through the aisles at a complete loss of what to get for her to eat. I needed more information and was borderline on a complete panic attack until I happened upon the popcorn....she loves popcorn! For the first few days she subsisted on a few gluten free cereals that I could find, some popcorn, Pediasure (because, as it turns out, that is gluten free), rice, milk and cheese. She never looked back. Within two weeks she wasn't having any more diarrhea and she started to have more energy. Her color changed from a pasty white to a more rosy glow and I think I may have finally gotten a full night of sleep. Celiac disease, it turns out, is very common and very much under diagnosed. They estimate that 1 out of 10 people has celiac disease and probably doesn't know it. On average, it takes about 11 years for the average adult to get diagnosed with celiac because it can have such a broad range of problems that it can cause. Mara's case was severe, but many cases show very mild signs and can look like a whole host of other problems - joint pain, muscle pain, weight loss, weight gain, intermittent gastrointestinal signs, gas, heartburn, even such things as poly cystic ovary disease and allergies have been possibly linked with celiac disease. Many people carry the genes for celiac disease, but that gene needs to be turned on before you actually develop clinical signs. It is a whole complicated genetic nightmare to try to figure out, but thankfully, the cure is easy.....don't eat wheat or any of its cousins. Mara's diagnosis led us to actually reading the labels of all the food we ate and, you know what, it is really scary to actually read labels! There are things that you cannot pronounce, much less know where or what they come from originally. Most of the un-pronounceables actually come from corn, but there are some that contain wheat, so we had to become very good at additives. The thing is, it is so much easier (and healthier) to eat things that don't contain additives...period. Fresh fruits and vegetables are always okay for Mara to eat, as are cheeses and dairy products, nuts and eggs. She became our living, growing, healthy model for what to eat! Initially, there were not many foods in the grocery store that were "gluten free", but the number and the amount of varieties continues to grow by leaps and bounds due to the number of people becoming diagnosed with this problem. There are now crackers and pasta noodles made with rice flour, or tapioca flour that are just as good tasting (if not better) than some of the regular crackers. There are now cake mixes that are gluten free and taste really great! The hardest part for us was that we cook for a family of 7 and now we had to cook for a family of 6 plus 1. All her meals have to be prepared first and with separate utensils so there is no cross contamination with wheat of any kind. Eventhough she was diagnosed when she was only slightly over 2, it was hard to always be the odd person out at every meal, especially when something really good was made like spaghetti and she would have to put up with eating a fried egg instead. So, I decided that I would try her gluten free diet as well. It required us to make her a "meal" rather than just left overs because I had to eat it too. I have been eating gluten free food for the last year and the oddest things have happened. Several of my chronic health issues have gone away - allergies improved, asthma improved, blood sugar stabilized. Not only that, but I simply can't eat a lot of the goodies that used to tempt me so easily - crackers....out, pastries.....out, donuts.....out. I have lost some serious pounds around the middle. All in all, a good change for me and watching Mara run around the house being as wild and crazy as all the rest of her siblings has made me a believer in what changing a diet can do for a person. So, now, when we decide what we are going to eat, we read the label and if there are ingredients there that require a chemistry lab to produce we tend to NOT eat those products. The less processing a food goes through and the more natural it is, the better it is for you - your body just knows what to do with it. Take margarine for example......have you looked at that label? partially hydrogenated vegetable oil...... you KNOW that took someone in a chemistry lab somewhere going "Maybe if I just put a few more hydrogens on this molecule, it will taste more like butter".....and it does, but at what cost? Now look at the ingredients of butter.....cream and salt.....that's it! You and I can identify cream and salt. Both occurring in nature and therefore something that our own metabolism is set up to deal with. Another one that gets me is high fructose corn syrup - it is in literally everthing these days - ketchup, soft drinks, salad dressings, cereals. Pancake syrup is quite simply nothing but high fructose syrup with maple flavoring! Here's the confusing part - it is the same molecule as table sugar....at least on the outside, but it was created differently (yes, in a lab) and it contains a double bond that, when it is broken down by our body, requires our body to deal with the substance differently than it would with regular sugar. There is too much of it and our bodies utilize it differently - two strikes, in my book, for why it should not be in the food system. But it won't go anywhere soon. Do you know why? ......because it is CHEAP! By God, the very thing that it comes from grows right outside my door in huge quantities.....not only that, but it is subsidized by the government That's right, the government, in all of it's infinite wisdom, pays our farmers to grow something that is chemically changed into something that will sweeten roughly 96% of everything we eat and then wonders why we have an obesity problem, which they will also have to figure out a way to pay for. There is a way to change it, however, and this was brought to light by Michael Pollan in In Defense of Food ....we need to vote with our forks three times daily. If we stop consuming it, there is no money in producing it. This book, and this whole philosophy, is essentially why we have started eating almost nothing except organic food with minimal processing....."if we buy it, they will come" Field of Dreams philosophy, I know, but it will work if enough people get on board. I look at Mara now and I think, "kid, you may have helped us all" because it was due to her that we finally started evaluating what we were eating and what that might be doing to us. I heard recently that eating really good quality food is like taking a bite of health insurance every time you do. I, for one, think they were absolutely right.

How Much Wood .....?

When we moved into this farm house, there were two furnaces. A traditional propane burning furnace, and a wood stove. At first, I was not sold on the whole wood burning idea - too much pollution, too much deforestation, too much work to get the wood. I felt that the propane furnace was the better way to go and actually visualized the basement without the monster of a wood burning stove in the way - "wow! think of all the space!" Not that I really had any idea what to do with that space in a 100 year old basement in a farm house. Just in case you have never been in an old farmhouse basement, let me tell you, they are scary, dark, musty, damp places that not even mice like to frequent. And this one was no different. Imagine a scene from Misery and you will have some idea of what the basement was like. But I digress. So, the first year in the house I don't think that we used the stove once. The chimney wasn't lined with anything which basically meant that all the smoke and heat was just behind the bricks and plaster in the house. A chimney fire would have been the end of us. The propane heater kept us from freezing to death, but it was a cold winter. That, combined with the fact that each room only had two 60 watt light bulbs in wall sconces led to some serious seasonal affective disorder. The second year, we had a few fires in the wood stove, mainly as an experiment to see if the chimney would hold. It did and the house took on a very warm cosy feel. We were sold! Not to mention that the prices of fuel oil and propane were heading ever upward. By year three, we were ready to line the chimney and see what it would really do for us. Keith risked life and limb climbing up on the three storey house to place a liner in the chimney and then purchased the brushes and needed equipment to clean it out yearly. But so much time and money was put into that work, that there was very little dry wood accumulated to actually burn that first year. Keith did put a cap on the chimney, however, to keep the birds out. This seemed like a great idea until I was lighting a fire the weekend he was away and a mostly burned up piece of cardboard floated up and blocked the grate. The house filled with smoke and we nearly froze to death as I had to open up all the windows so that we could breathe. I, of course, thought it was due to the wet wood I was trying to burn, but no amount of hot kindling stick fires could entice the fire to stop smoking up the house. I resorted back to the propane to save our lungs and only after Keith came home and braved the roof in sub zero temperatures did we figure out what had happened. There is no longer a grate at the top of the chimney and now there are a number of ill fated birds that remove themselves from the gene pool each year. Darwin's theories are alive and well. Year five on the farm led Keith on a mission for dry wood. Ice storms that took down huge numbers of trees were his best friend and he soon found that there was always plenty of neighbors with trees that needed splitting and hauling away. Little by little, the piles of wood grew, but the problem still remained that the wood needed to be dry. The first year was the hardest because he essentially had to cut and haul two year's worth of wood so that one could dry for a year. And then there is the problem of where to put it. Piles of wood emerged and seem to get rearranged every so often, but then I am not the one doing all the moving, so I try to stay quiet and avoid confrontation where the wood is concerned. My kids, however, seem to have found their purpose (at least as far as Keith is concerned) There is always wood to be hauled, or split, or cut, or moved. This job can keep him (and the kids) busy for hours and it is the perfect deterrent to misbehavior on a windy day in January, "Settle down right now or I will send you out to get a load of wood!" ....I usually don't see or hear from the kids for the rest of the day. Simon seems to have taken to the wood thing, however. He happily joins Keith on the tree finding missions and they will send hours cutting up logs to haul home. On a recent adventure in a neighbor's pasture, Keith had to dodge a charging bull while Simon leaped over the fence to avoid being gored with a horn. Nobody ever said harvesting wood was without it's risks. There have been any number of close calls. The sutures placed in a hand that inadvertently was in the way of the axe, the shins and toes that have been crushed. I know for a fact that if you loose a toe-nail it takes exactly 1 year to grow a new one. I know this because at Christmas one year, in the middle of the night while fueling the fire, I dropped a huge log on my big toe and proceeded to, through the next several weeks, watch the nail change from red to black and then fall off completely. By Christmas the next year, the new toe nail was finally long enough to have to trim. After finally getting enough wood to last through a winter, the next consideration was how to split it all. Keith had a few wedges that were procured in the chopping down of a huge maple tree, these he used for the first season of wood splitting. This was an agonizing process to watch. Keith is a tall, strong, wiry guy, but this was still agonizing to watch. The splitting maul was used to split smaller pieces and then wedges were used to split the larger ones. This was all well and good as long as Keith was home to do the splitting. I remember one very cold February when he was gone for a week - I don't remember now why he was gone, but it was probably to get away from his wife who was whining about being perpetually cold all the time. I was left to fuel the fire on my own and did manage to split a fair number of logs, but I don't think I could raise my arms by the end of the week. They say that splitting wood warms you twice - once when you split it and once again when you burn it - I find that to be very true. I have a feeling that if everyone in the country were to have to split wood to stay warm, there would be far less obesity problems in the world. But enough with the wedges. I just couldn't watch it anymore. So, for Christmas on the second year of burning wood, I gave Keith a hydraulic splitter - one that you have to work the handles to pump the hydraulic pump toward the wedge and thereby split the wood. I liked it - still required some work, but wasn't as back breaking as the other method. I could actually help with the splitting chores now and it got us through the winter. Keith, wasn't as sold - too wimpy for him. He has a love of tools - big tools - and his eye was on a motorized splitter which somehow seemed to materialize somehow - spirited to the farm as so many other tools have been before it. Again, I try to avoid getting between the man and his tools if possible. So now, we have the ultimate splitter. Keith claims to have an unhealthy relationship with this particular tool and I have to agree with him. He loaned it out to some friends of ours last winter and then it got snowed on. I caught him staring out the window with a distinctly bereft look on his face, worried that his splitter was alone and uncovered in the storm. But it does the trick. Many a night I will hear him and Simon outside splitting wood late into the evening and they come back into the house in good spirits and with a sense of camaraderie produced from tackling the job of felling, splitting and stacking a winter's worth of wood. The biggest drawback, is the hauling of the wood from the pile to the house. After a foot or more of snow, this gets to be an odious chore. The wheelbarrow works in the fall and spring, but the majority of the wood needs to be brought up when the weather is always at its worst. A nightly chore for the kids to go get a load in the sled and then bring it up and unload it, I feel, is a good one, but the guilt I feel watching them outside on the porch dropping the logs one by one down through the porch to the specially build window opening into the basement, is incredible so there are many loads that I haul and unload either by myself or with them and there are many loads that Keith hauls and unloads by himself. My favorite is a kid that is looking to earn either more time on the computer or some money to buy something that they want - two loads of wood hauled and unloaded will earn a kid 20 more minutes of computer time or $2 extra of allowance (personally, the allowance is the better way to go, but then I am not a kids anxious to play Runescape online.) All in all, I love the fire. I have mastered starting a roaring fire with one match (or less if you have good embers). I collect all the small twigs in the spring and we save those in empty feed bags in the shed so they are dry and hot for starting fires in the winter. The entire house becomes warm with wood heat - the floors, the walls, the attic where the girls now have their rooms. Most nights it is too hot to go to bed with covers and by morning you are comfortably snug in a cool house. The smell of the wood burning outside is a very comforting smell - very similar to the feeling you get sitting around a campfire, there is something about fire that is very primordial and part of what sets us apart as a species. The burning of wood for fuel does have its drawbacks - it does pollute, but then again, so does oil as evidenced by the recent spill in the Gulf. The thing that draws me in the most is that it is renewable....and it really does grow on trees! We do our best at maintaining a balance - most of the wood that we take is dead fall or dying trees and we plant several trees each year to replace the ones that we have used. I see trees that get up rooted to make ways for houses or roads - huge stacks of it on the side of the road and I think, "What a waste!" knowing how many homes could be heated with that fuel. I think that our dependence on fossil fuels needs to come to an end - and will eventually, whether we want it to or not, but it is ridiculous knowing that there are other ways to produce electricity and heat that are not employed simply because they are too time consuming or strenuous to do. What do we need all this extra time to do? Watch T.V.? Not talk to one another? Catch up on Facebook with people we really don't ever see anyway? The modern life has given us the greatest gifts of ease and time.....the modern life has also given us the greatest curse as well - ease and time....time to sit and do nothing, ease to become complacent and greedy. There is something to the idea that splitting wood warms you twice, but it warms another way as well - I feel as though my kids, grumbling and complaining as they sometimes do will know where the warmth comes from - it comes from something that we grow and nurture and then cut and harvest, split, haul and burn and then lovingly plant again for another generation that we may never see. The winter at our house can be measured by the loads of wood, as the piles of split logs slowly shrink in size you know you must be getting closer to Spring and winter will eventually loose its death grip on the world. Just about the time that we despair of ever being free from the wood hauling chores, the tulips pop up, the windows come open and the thoughts of hauling wood disappear for an entire season.....unless you are my husband in which case you gaze longingly upon your splitter and you shine it up for another tree splitting season.

And So It Begins.....

Well, not really. We've actually been here for almost seven years. We have lived in this place, grown vegetables, harvested fruit, remodeled parts of the house, grown the family by two more people, lost jobs, gained jobs, met neighbors, lost neighbors.....so, in other words, we are somewhat entrenched into this ground. We've been here long enough to figure out what we want for ourselves and for our children. We came from the city. We lived in town in a relatively new house. We had two well paying jobs. We abandoned that ship for this......20 acres of Iowa farmland with a 100 year old house and a few out buildings. Of all the decisions I have made in my life, I will always think of this decision as one of the best. Where do we go from here? Where are we heading? These are always the eternal questions of every person regardless of their job or location. What's next? What's next for us is this: We are raising five children to be giving, gracious and hard working. We live on zero excess in a world of exuberant excess and we work to teach our kids to understand this for what it is.....too much "want" rather than "need", too much "privilege" rather than "right". We strive to raise our own food amidst a country with a huge obesity problem and a huge problem with how our food is raised and grown. There are no sudden changes to be made, but many small changes that can make a world of differences - we work to make those changes known. So, the point to this adventure is to keep track of the learning, the growing, the experimenting with finding the best way into an unknown future on 20 acres in Iowa.