After about eight weeks I am starting to get the hang of this no wheat/no gluten thing. Well, mostly. This afternoon I paid Cassidy to watch Devon while I went out for a decent bike ride. I figured two hours was too long to ask her for a freebie and it gave the added bonus of knowing her money grubbing heart would kick in after about 20 minutes and insure a kind treatment of her younger brother. Turns out she was super inspired by it because instead of popping in a movie she asked him if he wanted to make cookies for me. Devon is no fool, it’s not often the offer of unlimited dough eating comes his way, and so he eagerly accepted. So after riding my ass off I came home to a kitchen buried in about an inch of flour, ingredients strewn across the counters and two very eager children twitching with sugar rushes and the excitement of my taste test. I couldn’t bring myself to inform them that their baking endeavors were pointless, that no wheat could pass my lips. When they offered up the muffin pan overflowing with what appeared to be enormous cookie-muffins I dutifully spooned up a bite. Then they wanted me to take another, and yet another. I knew it was a bad decision but what could I say?
We cleaned up the kitchen and sat down to dinner. That is when the shakes began. Here I should insert that one of the best things about not consuming wheat products has been the lack of shaking in my life. I used to get sick after every meal or snack, wake up almost every morning feeling as though I was horribly hungover. I thought it was stress, that it would just go away and so I ate more in an attempt to rid myself of what I thought was hunger. Usually the additional snacks included wheat based foods. It was a vicious cycle. Tonight the same feelings came back and by a few bites into my dinner I could take no more. Cassidy helped me get Devon ready for bed and by the time he was in his PJ’s I was curled up in a moaning ball and fervently wishing he would stop moving so much because all his motion was causing the house to tilt in a most scary manner. After Cass tucked him in I finally oozed in to the bathroom and snuggled myself around the toilet. Another thing to insert is the fact that I have a teen age boy and a five year-old boy, both with fairly bad aim; if I wasn’t sick before, the reality of coming face to face with the smells of my boys’ lousy toilet skills and my equally lousy cleaning efforts would have expelled anything at all from my body. Needless to say the entire thing was not at all pretty.
As of this moment I vow to never again let any morsel of food containing wheat pass my lips. The experience of the toilet, the shakes and the aftermath of feeling as if my entire body has been pressed through a pasta maker is not really a good one at all. If the kids make me cookies I will explain to them that unless they want to first scrub the toilets there is no way in hell I will eat their presentations. And even then I’ll secretly toss it to the dogs.
