Adventures in Bennionland

Today, Wednesday, we had our follow-up appointment with Will’s Celiac Doc. It has been six months since his biopsy confirming his diagnosis. We’ve noticed that he has outgrown most of his pants, by length, so we were hopeful that he was on the up & up. Or up and out in terms of height and weight.

We got great news! In the last six months Will has gained almost 2 lbs (1.7 to be exact) and grown almost 2 inches!!! He moved from the 5th percentile to the 10th percentile in weight, and 5th percentile in height to 25th!

This means all the changes in our eating habits have paid off. Those peanut butter rice cakes, brown rice quesadillas, GF pancakes, quinoa lasagna, and all the other good food we’ve been eating has made a difference.

Doctor Berry expects that Will will always be thin given his stature, but he thinks he’ll put on some more good weight over the next couple of years.

Will was grateful for the good news – which for him was that he did not have to have a shot!

Well our little gluten-free family made it’s first foray into the GF online menu world.

Check us out!

And thanks to Liz and Melony at Kill.The.Gluten for letting us submit a recipe. I get so many ideas from their site – it helps make my GF life somewhat sane.

For those of you gluten-eaters – try this recipe only instead of making rolls buy Pillsbury Crescent rolls and put a little bit of the chicken mixture inside of it. Then bake according to the crescent roll directions – put a little dab of warm cream of chicken soup on top and presto!

That’s amore!

As most of you know this gluten-free (GF) journey has been a strenuous one for us. So when we discover a new product or a new food item that will make our life more flavorful it is magical. This week we had a moment like that when Eric and I were on a date on Friday.

We went to the Old Spaghetti Factory – a place that usually repels Celiacs like garlic to the vampires. So it shouldn’t be a surprise (especially to those of you who have spent more than ten minutes with me) that I cried when I discovered in the upper-left corner a note saying that at the restaurant offers many ‘Pastabilities’ such as (are you ready) GLUTEN-FREE noodles for most of their entrees! Yep, I teared up. Right there at the table.

Yet as wonderful as that moment was it was nothing like the following.

Two weeks ago, exactly, Eric decided to make dinner with the boys. I had bought some GF pizza crust mix (Arrowhead Mills) several months ago but we haven’t dared to make it. Partially because it takes a lot of time and partially because pizza is a sacred meal for Eric. He worked in a pizza joint for a while and ranks pizza as a top five food. There was a lot resting on this. Plus having a bad GF experience can be disheartening.

With that in mind Eric and super-helper Will set out to make a great GF pizza. And they more than succeeded. While the food was good, watching Will scarf down his pizza was almost more than Eric could handle. And watching Eric beam at having a new tradition with his boys was almost more than I could handle.