Settling down...

Well, since the last post, we have gotten all moved into our apartment, and Luca has really been improving. His cradle cap is almost GONE!! It's amazing. His mood has improved, he has gotten A MILLION TIMES CUTER every day... I can't even stand it sometimes, I just find myself kissing his cheeks over and over... the only missing piece of this puzzle is SLEEP. He is still a crappy sleeper. I have been successfully increasing his naps from 4, 30 minute sessions to 5-6, 30 minute sessions. But he still has night terrors, usually between 3-6am, where he just screams and screams. I haven't found a food that is associated with it yet. He still only sleeps 2-4 hours at a time, and only once or twice per night... after that he is awake and crying every hour. I can't wait for the day when I get to sleep again, and am very seriously going to delay the next kid for several years so I can recover from this. It's serious business, being sleep deprived!

I also got food poisoning AGAIN (we waited a day too late to cook some thawing beef) and then ONCE AGAIN (some chicken at my moms house smelt funky but I ate it anyways) since we've moved in. This is NOT helping my weight loss issues. I have been taking a probiotic daily now, hoping that helps. I actually just ordered some baby probiotics for Luca, too. Breast milk already has probiotics, but his gut is so irritated from his allergies that it might need the repairing power of extra probiotics. I am so angry that of ALL the reading I did while pregnant, not once did any book mention the western phenomenon of the damaged gut = proteins in breastmilk. If so, I would have gone on the GAPS diet before getting pregnant, to seal my gut wall and prevent any of this nightmare from ever happening. Maybe. Who knows. I just know in places where there are no antibiotics/refined foods, mothers don't have these problems of "colicky" babies.

For those of you wondering what on earth I am EATING since I don't eat gluten, dairy, eggs, tomatoes, coconut, or soy, here's some examples from my food diary (almost none of these foods come in packages, because packaged food is almost always covered in either soy or gluten from sharing machinery):

breakfast: leftovers, rice cereal (made with honey)
snack: almonds and blueberries
lunch: chicken or beef cooked in onion and garlic, rice, collard greens or sweet potatoes
snack: larabar, or some homemade baked goods (made from rice, bean, and tapioca flours)
dinner: beans or turkey, rice, carrots or kale or green beans

Today I added some gluten free oats to my diet, since Ash wanted oatmeal cookies for his birthday tomorrow. I'm also going to add quinoa soon. To eat like this, you have to be cooking CONSTANTLY. I'm lucky Ash works evenings and can do most of that stuff during the day for me, but I have cooked while wearing Luca on my back.

We LOVE living here, and are discovering great things about our neighborhood every day. We picked the place because it was cheap and not in a slum, but it turns out we lucked out. There is a lovely park and playground a few blocks away, an activist bakery down the street (they do make gluten free bread, I will have to see if the other ingredients are safe), and there seem to be a lot of kids around because there are TONS of schools and daycares.

Danielle and Leo came over yesterday, and we hadn't seen them since way before the holidays. It is SO SANITY PRESERVING to hang around another mom and baby. I think it calmed both of us down a great deal. The babies were VERY excited to see each other, so excited that they scared each other with their happy noises and burst into tears. Hee hee. It's funny how nothing seems as bad when I'm around another mom and baby. If Luca cries, I just deal with it rather than dive headfirst into an obsessive, stressful thought process. It's so weird how that happens, I don't understand it at all. Every little thing that goes wrong feels like the end of the world.

Allergen-free baking is a fun challenge!!



I just realized I never put or Christmas picture up here:


And here's Luca looking like a BIG BOY in front of our new place: