where oh where have I been? Not london, and not one queen.

Remeber my smelly son? The one that had his teacher bring to my attention the disturbing fact that yes, he really does fart way outside the parameters of anythign even remotely resembling normal?

He has coeliac disease.

This is why I have been absent from the blog. This is why I have spent the last four weeks trawling shops for gluten free products so that we may have a semblance of normalcy  to our new found diets.

This is why, the rest of my time not trawling shops, has been spent in the kitchen, modifying and tweaking and trying desperately to cling fast to familiar and comfrtable food we love and are loathe to give up.

This is why Sue Sheperd and her cookbooks have become my new best friends. The kind I have coffee with everyday and relax with at night.  This is why I am secretly slamming the incompetant (now dead) doctor who misdiagnosed my coeliac disease when I was 5.  because all of this could have been avoided. 

This is why my husband is discovering cullinary delights he otherwise would never have tried in a million years. And why he looks at me with a look of bemusement when we are in SumoSalad and I politely inquire what ingredients are in their salad dressings.  (regular soy sauce is out for coeliacs.)

SumoSalad where only too happy to bring me bottle after bottle of dressings to check the labels. (Which is why they have my loyal patronage)  The pesto chicken is GF, the spicy prawns are GF. My favourite salad, alas, is not. (Thai beef)

But the great thing about sumo salad is that they offer rice paper wraps. Which is GF. And they are moer than happy to bend over backwards to accomodate anyone who asks nicely.

My new favourite thing? the fact that I finally feel better than I have in years. And my boy is finally thriving. AND  is butt funk free.

not here….currently having a life. (for now)

I have been distracted of late, by motherhood. If you read the entry on my son’s parent-teacher conference, you’d know my poor boy is a little on the stinky side.  So we are conducting an experiment. Given that I am lactose intolerant, and our oldest child was slightly lactose intolerant when she was younger…she doesn’t really eat dairy foods so I am not suer if she has grown out of it, it simply doesn’t eat enough of it to make a blip on the radar these days…..I figure, let’s try cutting out dairy.

I am amazed by how much dairy we actually consume. But the boy has gotten to like milk and cheese products from goat and sheep rather quickly. (He despises soy with a passion and frankly I don’t blame him)

So I came up with a dairy free quiche tonight just for my boy. (The husband wasn’t home so it was safe to cook one….cause real men don’t eat quiche so the boys will actually eat it if Dad isn’t home)

Instead of using cream I mashed up a slab of feta made form goat’s milk and added some goats milk to the mashed up feta to give it the consistency of cream. Threw in some eggs, some sundried tomatoes and some of those herb sachets since my garden is too new to harvest yet and the local supermarket herbs look like the lettuce you find all runny in the bottom of your brother’s fridge. Guess what? There’s freakin milk in the herbs!  All I can do was shrug and let him eat it anyway….he’s intolerant not allergic, it on’t kill him, it’ll just make him smelly and uncomfortable.   Which made me think about all those poor parents who do have to contend with allergies. 

Most primary schools and daycare centres these days are peanut free. Long gone are the days when you can bake 24 cupcakes for your kids birthday and send them in to school, now you need to consider the kids with allergies and send them in with an ingredient list.  And as huge a pain in the ass it is that I can’t let my kid have his favourite sandwich of peanut butter and honey at school, I would much rather listen to him whine about it than be the cause of a kid going into anaphalactic shock.

Which is why I now have to march my youngest off to the doctor to get his immunisations up to date. With there being two kids with Luekemia at the school, things like chicken pox can be fatal.

So this is why I am not here at present. I have been busy and writing and reading and have relatives arriving next week for a week. And as much as I love my in-laws, I need to brace myself as we come from two very different worlds.

the pitfalls of parenting

This afternoon I had an interesting talk with my sons teacher. It was parent/ teacher interview time again. Now I have a pretty odd sense of humour, I like toilet humour, I like dark humour, I like dry, droll and pithy. I am sarcasm, I love puns.  We laugh a lot in this family.  Trying to have a serious conversation with any of us is a painful experience. We have a tendency to get all humourific on your ass.

My kids go to a  Catholic School. My sons teacher is fabulous. She has a pretty good sense of humour, (thank the stars) which is just as well since she’s teaching my kid.

My son is visually impaired. He has monocular vision and the sight he does have in his seeing eye is starting to deteriorate…thank fully at a slow pace so far…touch wood.

So her first concern was his hand writing. Which has always been an issue. Plus the kid is lazy, he is capable of writing legibly, he chooses not to.  His math is coming along well, he still has a few problems with long division but over the next few weekends we can fix that. (My kids are geeks, they ask me to do maths with them on weekends. I can’t think where they get it from)

but this is pretty good given the kid skipped a grade.

When she cleared her throat and said to me, “Now I’m not sure how to put this delicately….” I will admit to a moment of panic….a  moment of What the hell did he do? Did he call someone a Smeg head again? AND then tell them what smegma meant? (He did this in play school- he only ever attended the one term)  I was literally ready to sink through the floor and listen to a sermon on age appropriate veiwing for my kid.

but then she said, “….seems to have a flatulence problem.”

Well, I couldn’t help it, I broke up laughing. The issue is my kid farts too much. And it’s no surprise. The kid can’t go more than 10 minutes without cutting the cheese. And he really stinks. The air in his bedroom is CHUM. So chunky you can carve it. We literally take a deep breath before opening the door, run in, tuck him in and run out again before taking another breath. The kid has the most toxic ass known to man kind. I thought he was storing it all up at school and letting it go at home.

His teacher brought it up because she was worried about it interferring with his social development. (Apparently the girls won’t go near him) I have been wondering more and more recently over his prolific rear emissions, I’m betting his carbon footprint is enormous just on gases alone, so I am taking him to the doctor next week. I think my boy may have a food intolerance.  (And I think I will get his little brother checked out while I am at it, his bum is pretty funky too)

I never ever thought I’d see the day where the point of order at a P/T interview was over how often a child breaks wind. Poor kid, and being the wonderful parents that we are he has had to endure nothing but fart jokes and name calling since.

And no, I don’t feed the kid beans. But I am worried that some day his claim to fame will be that he can fart the alphabet, in six langauges.