Christmas 2013

Michael eating his new favorite food, baked oatmeal, for post-church Christmas brunch.  Oats are fermented for a day with ground buckwheat, then rinsed off and mixed with eggs, ghee/coconut oil/pork fat, salt, vanilla, cinnamon, some fruit (blueberries and apples in this case), some dried liver (can't help myself), and baked at 350 degrees for about 40 minutes.

This was the first toy he opened.  Christmas was over after this.  We had to pretty much take the duck away to get him to open anything else.  (Thanks, MoMo!)

I made him a Bad Piggie/Yoda.  Not as big of a hit as the duck.

Michael got distracted.  It took about four hours to open up all the presents.

"All I want for Christmas is to DESTROY"

Our first present from Michael.  (His teacher put this ornament together at school, but apparently Michael picked out the details for us, like the wrapping paper.)  He got very upset when we hung the ornament, instead of putting it back in the box where it belonged.

South Carolina

"Wanna share!!"  -Michael in genuine tears, holding the Kindle out towards to Evan, after it got taken away because they were fighting over it

"Booku's going down!"  --Michael, echoing cousin Brennan teaching his brother Evan how to trash talk ("Michael's going down!")

side note:  Michael derived more joy in tossing the paddle across the air hockey table (seen above), scoring goals for the opponent, and watching the scoreboard, than actually playing.

"Wanna play with cousin Evan?"
"No."
"Wanna play with cousin Brennan?"
"No."
"Wanna play with cousin Aiden?"
"No.  Wanna play cousin Daddy."

Michael got very agitated by this goose and tearfully demanded that he go back in the water.

I don't have a good photo to accompany this quote, but Grammy was babysitting a very upset Michael:

Grammy: "Sssh.... calm down, Michael."
Michael (in tears):  "Don't say 'sssh!'"

Michael is basically a southern woman

Right around the time Michael and I got to Wisconsin (early this month), he adopted a new mannerism.  This saying immediately improves any sentence.  By way of example, here are two instances from today:

Scenario 1 -- we're in the car, listening to "Everywhere That We Go," which is one of those perpetual songs.  The last line of the verse is "And if they can't hear us, we sing a little louder" and it gets repeated.  But the last line of the whole song is "And if they can't hear us... they're deaf!"  Michael's commentary:  "You're deaf, mmm-hmmm, that's right!"

Scenario 2 -- Michael hurts Daddy's nose.  "No, Michael, that's not nice!"  Michael:  "not nice... mm-hmmm, that's right!"

He also like to validate his own opinions.  For example, he'll be sitting down eating some almonds and say something like "I love almonds.  Yup, mm-hmmm, that's right!"  Or he confirms a request.  "I want nummies.  Okay!  Yup, mmm-hmm, that's right."  Or if he knows that it's something that I usually say but he says it instead.  "God bless Booku.  Yup, mm-hmmm, that's right."

At the Little Gym

Teacher: "What is your name?"
Michael: "Name... Booku!"
Teacher: "And who is that?"
Michael: "Mommy!"

So clearly we can make the "M" sound, we just choose not to. And I hope he never does; he will always be my little "Booku."

Michael's latest checkup

He had a follow-up appointment on the 19th with the doctor who diagnosed him.

He's 32-33 months, but his age equivalents were 18 months for gross motor, 30 for visual reception, 26 for fine motor, 25 for receptive language, and 26 for expressive language.  Overall his "Early Learning Composite percentile rank" is 25.  There is a little note on the data sheet I asked them to copy:  "Twisting of Cap Perseverations" because he kept running over to me during the test to twist and untwist a cap off of my water bottle.

The doctor was optimistic with our more intensive therapy schedule that Michael will catch up to a great extent.  She does feel that intense therapy is critical, and also strongly encouraged me to enroll him in a Mother's Day Out program to bring a sense of structure to his days which should help him with his dysregulation, among other things.  All the MDO programs I've looked into are full, but I'm #1 on a waiting list at our church.  (Skipped to the front of the line since we're parishioners, awwww yeah.)

He's been really cute lately, singing along to his favorite music.  His hero is Mike Tompkins, a guy on YouTube who sings a capella (including all the instruments; there's around a dozen or two dozen layers of audio on each of his tracks).  Michael was beat boxing to one of his songs today.  It was ridiculous.  He also loves singing the "bump bump bump" part to Sally the Camel (who had five, then four, then three, then two, then one, then no humps) as well as chiming in at the end that she's a horse.

Conversation with a 2.5-y/o

Scene:  getting out of the shower

Michael:  "Keeno!"  ("Father, may I have the Kindle, perchance?")

Ben:  "Diaper first."

Michael: "Diaper Keeno!"

Ben:  "Vitamins after diaper."

Michael:  (sad) "Diaper Mins."  (happy) "Mins Keeno!"

Ben:  "No, then we brush your teeth."

Michael:  "Mins teef!  Teef keeno!"

Ben:  "Then it's time for num nums."

Michael:  "Num nums!  Keeno!  Num nums!"

He never got to play the Kindle before falling asleep.

We found Michael passed out with his hand down his diaper.  But before you think we're bad parents, notice the hair of the dog we placed within arm's reach for when he wakes up. 

At the Houston Zoo

The little pond at the botanical gardens

At the botanical gardens with Teresa and her kids

Riding the train at Zilker

In front of the Capital Building that we explored with Rachel 

Watching the House play solitaire on their computers

Michael LOVED the "butt heart" 

Michael being one of the big boys and riding the zip line

Visiting the O. Henry house with Popo

Michael received an official diagnosis of autism on his half-birthday, May 6th.  Every mommy wants her children to grow up healthy and happy, so this has been hard for me to deal with, even though we've suspected it for awhile and his therapists all said he was likely on the spectrum.  The pediatric development specialist said he has a "mild" case.

I'm pretty sure I have a touch of Asperger's syndrome myself, which makes it especially difficult to relate to him most days.  I'm not terribly empathetic toward my autistic two-and-a-half-year old and have trouble seeing things from his perspective.  Moreover, I get frustrated often because this doesn't fit my master plan where he learns to read at 3, is doing arithmetic at 4, gets accepted to a prestigious and highly selective preschool, and everything just falls into place until he goes to college when he's 10.  When he's spending an inordinate amount of time opening and closing doors, my frustration sets in.  This is a time for grace.

Michael is special.  Not just because of the autism.

• He has a pure heart.  I have never known Michael to hit or bite or kick any other children, even when they provoke him.  Every other child his age that I've been around has shown these aggressive behaviors.  I don't begrudge them because I know it's normal, but Michael's gentleness is very noticeable.
• He's very loving.  He loves to ask for "kees!" and put his forehead near our lips, and he randomly hugs and kisses Ben and me.
• He gives.  He shares his toys, he gives back toys to others, he feeds me.  It's in his nature to nurture.

We are bumping up therapy.  We're doubling his private therapy from 2 to 4 hours a week, and we're adding in ABA therapy in his ECI protocol for another 2 hours a week.  Add to that the hour each with (on average) with his other ECI therapists.  We're limiting screen time.  

Of interest is this article, Summary of Biomedical Treatments for Autism .  Ben actually found it.  It's an overview of the effectiveness (according to parents) of various drugs, diets, and supplements in the treatment of autism.  The last page has a nice summary, and one of the first pages lists their recommendations:

"Treatment Order: 

We have listed the various treatments in approximate order of what is typically recommended, [...]: 

• Improve Diet 
• Food Sensitivities 
• GFCF Diet 
• Vitamin/Mineral Supplements 
• High-Dose Vitamin B6 and Magnesium 
• Essential Fatty Acids 
• Gut Treatments 
• Antifungals 
• Probiotics 
• Digestive Enzymes 
• Amino Acids 
• Melatonin 
• Thyroid Supplements 
• Sulfation 
• Glutathione 
• Chelation 
• Immune System Regulation "

We're basically working our way down the list.  He's on GAPS (a variation of the SCD diet, which was one of the most effective treatments listed), GFCF diet, and we're currently playing around with some vitamin and mineral supplementation (especially since he's dairy-free; need those bone-building minerals!).  We haven't addressed food sensitivities yet.  There's actually a multivitamin for autistic children called Super Nu Thera that our doctor recommended, but even with fructose as the #1 ingredient, it's pretty hard to get down.  I made some banana soft serve tonight (frozen mashed bananas; has the consistency of fro-yo) and mixed it in, and he had some of it then, but that's the only way I've gotten him to take it.  And even then he didn't finish it.

Michael reciting the alphabet

The best part is around the 1:10 mark:  "W"

Michael will learn to read before he learns to talk...

... as Ben and I keep joking.  He has a keen interest in the alphabet.  I'm not quite sure how, but he's been able to identify all his letters for some time now.  The only time we really "practice" the alphabet is occasionally at the park, I'll sing the alphabet song and point to the letters that are imprinted on a wall on the playscape.  It certainly wasn't enough that I expected him to learn the alphabet that way, but then we were playing with alphabet flash cards and I would put out half a dozen random letters and ask "Which is L?" and he got all the letters this way (not even in order!).  This was probably a few months ago.

Over the last few weeks, he's been trying really hard to talk.  He's imitating all the sounds we make, and we know him well enough to decipher that "opa!" means "open" and "fffff" means "off," and so on.  He's having trouble putting two different sounds together, and it was actually only yesterday I heard him say "opa" for the first time.  We've been working hard on that one -- he has been doing "oh!" or "pah!" for "open" depending on the context, and I've been trying to get him to combine the two sounds.

Today we were coloring and I wrote out the alphabet on a big piece of paper.  I pointed at each letter in succession and he told me what it was as best he could; he couldn't make most of the sounds, but you could tell the wheels were turning and figure out what he was trying to say.

It must be terribly frustrating for Michael to have all these thoughts and have such trouble communicating.  He's getting better, and he's trying his hardest, God bless him.  He actually doesn't seem frustrated, but instead proud at what he can say, which is great.  I'm more frustrated than he is.  :-\

---

Cute anecdote time.  Michael knows that kisses are exchanged when he is upset, but he seems to be confused as to the direction.  Whenever he gets hurt, or gets upset, he scrunches his face and gives me a big wet kiss.  Even when he's mad at me.

Gratitude Journal, week of 3/25/13

Well, here's my last entry into the gratitude journal.  I remembered almost every day of Lent to do this; I at least stuck to this one much better than my "no cheese" sacrifice, sadly, which I failed to adhere to for about the last two weeks.

Gratitude Journal, week of 3/18/13

The Smiths Visit Austin

Gratitude Journal, week of 3/11/13

Gratitude Journal, week of 3/4/2013

"Ba Ba"

I went to milk goats last night so Ben put Michael to sleep by himself.  When I got into bed, I thought Michael was asleep, until I heard him coo "baba" (it's what he has been calling me the past two or three days) and crawl over to me.  It warmed my heart.  He's never called me by my "name" before.  If we ask "where's mama?" he'll point at me, or he'll repeat back "baba" when we say "mama" but that was the first time he spontaneously called for me.

Gratitude Journal, week of 2/25/13

Gratitude Journal, week of 2/18/13

Pictures from Ben's camera

Finally uploaded the photos from Ben's camera from the past two and a half months!  Here are my favorites.

Michael found and dumped a box of spaghetti on the floor.  And put the strands back one by one.....

This was not staged.  For a few days, Michael decided that sitting in his toy bus was the best place to chill and play on the Kindle.  I haven't seen him do it recently.

Okay, Ben says if I upload one then I have to upload the whole sequence of these next four shots.  This is from the night we had Adrianne and Jeff over.

Michael chewing on his bear.

"Look Ma!  No hands!" 

We take the bear away so you can see his face.

Grumpy, bear-less Michael. 

So THIS happened in our backyard!  Michael is gleeful after Grammy helps him go down the slide.

At the Science and Nature Center

Michael did not want to leave the owl.  I picked him up, set him down far away, and he ran right back over.  Future Rice student, like his daddy?

River:  "If I'm not mistaken, these fish are in the cichlidae family."   Michael:  "Oh yes, dear River, I agree with your taxonomic evaluation.  Observe how the lower pharyngeal bones are fused into a simple tooth-bearing structure.  Just like Wikipedia says."

"River is wading in the river.  I need to find a nice rock to sit on to ponder this recursive event and come up with some sort of  hackneyed Inception joke."

"These bones won't fit in Mommy's stock pot."

River played "one of these things on the table is not like the other" while Michael is looking for edible turtle meat.  The good stuff is next to the bone!  Okay, I admit I can't tell what he's holding.

"They stuck a rod in the middle of this one.  What a waste of a ball."

Lenten Sacrifices

For Lent, I am sacrificing one thing and doing another.

I've already given up sugar, grains, and fruit, so what else is there?  Well... cheese.  I love cheese and eat it almost every day.  Lately I've been trying out lots of raw goat and sheep milk cheeses (which are easy to digest and pretty healthy, assuming they're grass-fed, which I hope but am not certain they are).  Aged manchego, murcio curado, Idiazabal.  Oh my gosh.  I am addicted to cheese like nothing else.  I love the taste of avocados, but they don't make me high.  Cheese does, I swear it does, it does something crazy in my brain when I bite down into a hunk of rich, aged, cultured milk solids.  I am constantly looking forward to my next salty, slightly nutty fix.  My favorite part?  The rind.

What I'm trying to get at is it doesn't sound like a big deal, but for me, giving up cheese is giving up the only intensely pleasurable thing in my diet.  Sure, I like the food I eat, but I love cheese.  I had a wedge of Manchego today (party Sunday!), which I had been looking forward to since Ash Wednesday.  And I'm already anticipating which cheese is going in my belly next Sunday.  (Ben says the Sunday exception thing is cheating.)

I'm also trying to pick up something this Lent I did awhile ago, which is to record at least 3 things that I am grateful for each day, preferably something I had a hand in as opposed to something that happened to me, but I'll take either.  The idea is to be on the lookout all day for things to be happy about.

Without further adieu, here is my gratitude journal for the week of 2/13/13....

The only way Michael will eat an avocado...

...is like a banana.  (And you thought I was going to say "while playing Swampy"!)

Visit from ACJP

My Great-Aunt Adrianne and Great-Uncle Jeff came to Austin for a conference a few weeks back, and Michael and I got to hang out with them....

... at the Children's Museum:

"Let us dine on... this one."

"This gives me a great idea for a Rube Goldberg device."

He spent SO much time playing with the gate.  Jeff said maybe he'll be a doorman, and I replied that yes, we had high hopes for Michael.

The Tongue of Happiness.

"I is engineer like Daddy."

"I is musician like Daddy."  (Michael loves when Daddy plays clarinet or banjo.)

"I is engineer like... Daddy?"

"If I can't reach the top, I can at least reach the very bottom."

"Let's see... the speed is the square root of twice the gravity times distance times gravitational constant, so if I want the ball to land in the bucket...."

... at the botanical gardens:

"Look Michael!  A velociraptor!"

"Mommy, I was under the impression the butterfly garden would have actual butterflies."

... and at our house.  (Pictures forthcoming, I hope.)

Michael's diet turnaround

Michael has turned into the pickiest toddler ever into an adventurous eater.  He had a spinach quiche and soup for breakfast; and lamb liver pate, a fermented carrot stick, and fermented cod liver oil for lunch.  All this without having to bribe him with anything!  He dove right in and has been eating like a champ.  (I caved and let him play the Kindle as a reward anyway, since I had to clean up.)  Last few days he's been snacking on sauteed lamb kidneys... like, I don't even have to hide the taste of the organ meats in muscle meat.  He's eating straight-up kidneys and liver.

I think yesterday was his first full day of GAPS, and he's on the full diet, not the "intro" diet (if you're familiar with the term) since he's so young.  We're both on full GAPS.  I'm eating dairy, but he's not (for now; maybe he can have kefir, I'm still looking into that).  I'm not eating fruit because of my candida, but he's having a little.

It took a week or so of deprivation, but he seems to have gotten the idea that his only chances to eat are what's in front of him.  I'm also nursing him much less frequently, perhaps every 3-5 hours, whereas a few months ago it was still every 2-3 hours.

More on Autism

After a lot of research and finding more sources citing the gut-brain connection as a possible cause of autism, even Ben is starting to buy into the theory.  He's not hopeful, but he's not hopeful about any silver bullet, and he does think it's worthwhile to try.

So Michael is about to embark on an even stricter diet.  It's more important now that he not eat any allergens or difficult-to-digest foods -- dairy, gluten, soy, grains.  And he needs more probiotic foods.  We're currently transitioning him by trying to train him to replace his some of his old standbys with better options.  

We used to use raisins to bribe him to eat things like broth, but we discovered something that works even better:  10 or 20 minutes on the Kindle or one of his other "loud" toys.  Now, he only gets screen time if he eats a bite of x or y.  It actually works better than bribing with raisins; he's trying things he would never try for just raisins.  In the past day and a half, we've gotten him to eat cheese, kefir (both of which are probably getting phased out with dairy; not sure about kefir yet), fermented pickles, fermented carrot sticks, fermented sauerkraut juice, raw egg yolk, broth, omelette with spinach, his cod liver oil.  For treats he got to eat banana and broth chips and walnuts.  Many of those are things he wouldn't touch before.  He barely touched the cabbage juice, but his ECI therapist said it's great if it gets on his tongue because it can take multiple exposures to adjust one's tastes.

The second approach we're trying is to really hammer in communication skills.  We're getting better at holding out on his requests until he makes eye contact and vocalizes something.  In the case of his ball, he can even consistently say "bah!", which I think is his first pseudo-work.  (I still swear he did say "jeez!" and "ow sigh!" a long time ago for "cheese" and "outside," but he's never repeated this.  He seems to consistently associate "bah!" with "ball", though.)

I've become very sad and feel broken, and I think Ben is sad too, but we handle it differently.  I am retreating more, stress-eating again (serious ongoing problem for me), trying to escape the moment.  Ben is getting more involved with Michael, with the love and patience of a saint.  He's an incredible dad.  Michael truly prefers Ben most of the time now.

Autism

Ben and I noticed that recently Michael has been ignoring us and avoiding eye contact.  He is more difficult to engage and has become more withdrawn.  Not that he was ever outgoing, but he was making progress and now seems to be backsliding.  One of my friends noticed it too.

His ECI therapist also noticed the regression on Thursday.  He wasn't responding to his name or making eye contact, but was hypersensitive to some background noises (like the washing machine running or my cell phone going off).  I asked her about revisiting the autism diagnosis, and she said that she's definitely noticing some stronger signs now, but again, it's still too early to say for sure.

That was still hard to hear.  I feel at fault based on my poor gut flora, my antibiotics at birth, the full vaccination schedule we had him on, his and my sub-optimal diets, and so on.  I suspect no one who is possibly reading this is sympathetic of my point-of-view here, which I guess is a good thing for once, because it means the only person who blames me is me.  I'm not sure how hard I want to convince anyone else that the causes of autism are quite possibly environmental, but here is an article that mainstream science (the American Association of Pediatrics) is starting to recognize the connection between gut and brain.  So yeah, this makes me feel rather terrible.  Naturally I want to give Michael every advantage in life I can and to think that I did something detrimental to him is devastating.

His therapist said that she recommended we remove from his sight anything that makes noise or has a battery (including music).  I balked a little -- even though we've never bought him anything that makes noise (unless you count the Kindle Fire), his relatives have gotten him noisy toys and he does seem to love them.  And his music!  He always needs to have a CD going in the background.  But he kept ignoring us during the session and turning on his battery-operated toys to have a constant stream of sound.  She then suggested we at least limit his exposure.  He's having sensory overload issues and would rather retreat into his own world with his noisy stuff than interact with us.  I asked why he goes out of his way to avoid eye contact (as in, if I keep trying to stick my face in front of his eyes, he'll avert his gaze so he never makes eye contact with me) and she said that eye contact can be intense and a lot of information for someone like him to take in, especially if his system is worn out from processing all the other input.

Since Thursday (so two days now) he's still getting quite a bit of his noisy toys and music, but much less than he had been.  We're slowly phasing it out.  His eye contact and interaction has been improving the last two days -- not perfect, but on the right path.

On an unrelated note, Michael can now run up the stairs without holding onto anything.  It's a little scary.

Michael problems

Michael qualified for state Early Childhood Intervention and is now seeing four different therapists (two private, two from ECI).  Still not talking.  His private speech therapist told me last week that she's never had anyone in therapy as long as him without learning to "turn on their voice," i.e. learning to vocalize his wants (not necessarily talk; grunting counts).  I've been leaving Michael alone at his sessions the last few weeks so I don't get to witness them anymore, but she told me she spent the whole hour trying to get him to say/grunt anything before she'd give him what he wanted, so they spent the whole hour doing pretty much nothing.  He'll point, he'll sign emphatically, but he won't speak.

He'll be 27 months old soon.  (Yes, I still count by months!)  He still nurses frequently, and let me tell you, it's a myth that lactational amenorrhea is a myth!  I haven't had a period in almost 3 years now.  This seems very harmonious if you believe, as I do, in the Weston A. Price foundation which states that traditional societies spaced children 3-4 years apart and that "[...] allowing at least three years between pregnancies permits the mother to recover her nutritional stores between children and to provide sufficient attention to each child..." (source).  So, in other words, traditional breastfeeding practices lend itself naturally to healthy child spacing.  God is pretty clever.

I love nursing him DURING THE DAY, but the nighttime nursing is getting incredibly difficult for me.  He got me up 4 times last night, and he always wants to lay ON TOP of me, which is not trivial when your "little baby" is now 30 pounds, so now I wake up every day with back pain.  He also sucks continuously, and as soon as I break the latch, he wakes up.  I am his "lovey."  And he's so big that, like I said, I can't comfortably nurse him continuously at night anymore.

So now I'm looking into night weaning.

Diet

I started a new temporary diet in a holistic attempt to heal my chronic inflammation.  It's complicated, but if I were to sum it up for people who don't really care but politely ask about it anyway:  inflammation is autoimmune, your gut is like 80% of your immune system, so if your gut is out of balance with bad bacteria, it causes a host of degenerative diseases such as chronic inflammation.  So my diet is an attempt to starve out the bad bacteria while replenishing it with good bacteria.  The two-pronged approach is to eat lots of easy-to-digest foods (that gets digested in the upper part of the GI tract and passed right through the lower, hence starving the bad stuff; also, not eating any sugar, including fruit, which feeds the bad bacteria) while eating a lot of probiotic foods (repopulating with good bacteria).  Ideally, this is for every single meal of the day.  I started off strong and am kind of burned out so I have been cheating a little lately, eating harder-to-digest foods, and I can tell the difference.

I could go on forever about digestive health.  In fact, I did but I erased it.  If you're interested, here is a good page that summarizes it:  Probably the Most Important Thing I’ve Learned About Health: Digestion & Elimination

I got a book out of the library by Weston A. Price called "Nutrition and Physical Degeneration."  Dr. Price was a dentist who traveled the world and found that people who traditional, nourishing diets were virtually free of cavities, tooth decay, and dental crowding.  They had wide jaws, generous nasal passages (unlike me -- I'm a mouth breather), and wide hips (for easy childbirth).  They were almost free of degenerative diseases and digestive disorders.  These societies, of thousands of people, didn't even have prisons.  As soon as these societies introduced "modern" foods, all the above became rampant  Amazingly, this was back in the 1930s!  "Modern white man" foods were simple things like white flour, canned produce, and refined sugar.  Imagine how "far" we've come since then.

After reading the book, I'm certain that my serious health issues are because of my diet when I was developing (starting with the fact that I was given soy formula, since Mom had to work and I had such a severe anaphylaxis to cow's milk that I was hospitalized).  Dr. Price's book is full of "before/after" photos and I am a perfect "after" specimen, with my severely deformed jaw and teeth, chronic health issues, mouth breathing, and narrow hips.  With all my health issues and the time and money I've sunk into treating them, truly I can attest an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.  I'm sure if my parents had known, they would've done differently, but now we know.  The damage is done, but not for Michael.

And THAT is why I am so concerned about what Michael eats.  He is fighting an uphill battle, having to overcome my defects.  (He won't be able to truly overcome them.  It takes a couple generations to fix, and he didn't get the best start.)  I rarely let Michael eat any grains and if he does, it's fermented (e.g. sourdough) or sprouted grains.  He never gets refined sugar (he sometimes has honey or stevia), not even on his birthday.  More difficulty, I am trying to get him to eat nutrient-dense foods, such as raw egg yolks, liver, broth, and fermented cod liver oil.  (Sample dinner:  "Salisbury steak" made from a mix of ground beef, ground liver, and other offal, with a sauce made from ghee, reduced bone broth, and a raw egg yolk whisked in at the end.  He actually likes it!)  It's easier to keep things out of his diet than to get things in, but he's getting a little better now that he knows he can't hold out for fruit anymore.  I had been giving him fruit or sprouted bread or whatever just so he'll eat *something*, and now I don't.  He eats what I give him or doesn't get anything.  (Although sometimes I bribe him to eat nourishing foods with his favorite treat -- raisins.  However, it never gets to displace the healthy foods.)  It's tough love.  :-)  Right now he's snacking on dehydrated bone broth chips and grass-fed beef snack sticks.

Ideally I would've done all this as soon as he started eating solids.  This is a difficult time to start -- toddlers are notoriously picky.  I have Mommy Guilt over the stuff I gave him as a baby, genuinely believing it was healthy (liked puffed wheat cereal and oatmeal).  But as long as he's still growing, it's not too late!

I promised Ben I'd loosen up a little bit once Michael is around school-age.  Like, when he's 6, he can go out occasionally to Chick-Fil-A with the grandparents as a special treat, that sort of thing.  Until then, he's growing so quickly that I believe it's important he eats only wholesome foods.