Allergy Parent's Bat Signal: Homeschool, 504, something else?

I have probably sat down to write this blog post, or one very similar a million times.  I wind up getting rambly and not having a real point, so they are all just archived and will never see the light of the actual interwebz, which is likely for the best.

Today, however, I have a purpose in mind.  I would like feedback.  I would like ideas.  I would like someone to pat me on the back and say "there there I get it, this is how we handle it and it will all be okay."

Trouble is you can't give me the last one 100% and it is the one I want the most.  But I do know that I can get some ideas and feedback from other been there done this parents, and that is primarily what I am hoping for most realistically.

The Beans has allergies to six out of the top eight major food allergens.  I have discussed it briefly on this blog a few times, but mostly because I didn't want to make this into an "allergy mom" blog I have refrained.  I didn't mention all the weird reactions, the ones we couldn't explain.  I haven't detailed the panic I have felt countless times in silly situations that should be innocuous and no big deal because I am paralyzed with fear that Beans has been exposed and may puff up and stop breathing on me.  I didn't share about the time his face swelled up or the countless hives we have had to watch and Benadryl out of existence.

I didn't want this to become and "allergy mom" blog because, well if we gonna be blunt, I don't want to be an allergy mom.  It was a little corner of my world where I could just pretend it isn't a biggie.

But I suck at pretending.

So, the Beans will be three in April.  Apart from the normal "oh my gosh my baaaaaby!'ing that I am doing at this I am also arrested with a new panic.

School.

Starting with the 2014/15 school year in August the Beans is preschool eligible.  Bunyan and I have oscillated a million times on where we stand on the subject.  He was the one to panic first (outloud) and say "can't we just homeschool him?"

I never pictured being a homeschool parent.  I used to be pretty opposed to the idea.  At present, I have educated myself a lot more on what GOOD homeschooling looks like and I have no opposition to it in principal.  Just ... do I want to do it?

My hesitancies with homeschooling Beans, and I mean really homeschooling him, not the summer school stuff I do with Meatball which we are prepping for already this year, stem from two main thoughts.

One: He would love a classroom environment SO much.

Two: I was kinda looking forward to having him go to school for MY sake.  

So if item numero dos makes me a bad mom, okay.  I am going for honest here, and to be honest I was looking forward to the possibilities of 3 hours a day while he is in preschool AND then once he is in full day maybe I could go back to work?  I could be ME, more than just the mom and house elf.  Not necessarily a decision maker, but financially this would make a big difference to us as a family too.

Item number one is the part that makes me sad.  I don't know how to look into homeschooling groups in my area to help with the socialization stuff.  The one I found says it is "closed" which was pretty discouraging.  I am not well versed on my state's laws regarding homeschool, I have a lot of research to do.

Academically, I am not worried.  That is so not my issue.  It is all the other stuff.

But when I start to think about sending him off to school ... I am overwhelmed with the number of opportunities with which he could be exposed.  I am well versed in 504 plans, I will link some stuff I have found at the end of this post in case it is helpful to anyone else.  But a 504 plan is just a plan.  Even a really good one, even when executed by a phenomenal teacher and school staff is less secure and safe than my home is.  My home is kept as free of any allergen as possible.

You start talking about removing allergens from public school classrooms and people bust out the pitch forks and start talking about their kid's fundamental need and right to have peanut butter.

It isn't that I disagree with those parents.  It is just that when debating about their 8 hours of inconvenience that can help improve the chances of keeping my kid alive I have a hard time not becoming emotionally involved in the discussion.  

And honestly, I don't think peanut and tree nut free classrooms in my school district and area are a big deal anymore, so it isn't the peanut butter.  It is all the other stuff.  Beans cannot come in contact with peanuts, tree nuts, dairy, egg, soy, gluten, honey, bananas, and possibly latex.  Even if parents, teachers and a school were willing it would be challenging.  Add to this that they won't be willing to remove all those things from the school day for my special snowflake and you introduce risks.  What if Jimmy doesn't wash his hands and touches Beans?  What if snacks are mixed up and he eats something he shouldn't?  What if, what if, what if?! 

So then my mind goes back to homeschooling and round and round we go.  Bunyan is no better with this, he cycles as much as I do about it.

So here is the part where I hope to get feedback.  If you DO have a school aged kiddo with food allergies what do you do?  If your child attends school (public or otherwise) outside your home what kind of 504 plan do you have in place?  If you homeschool what does that look like and what brought you to this decision?

If you don't have any feedback for me, but could share this with anyone you think might, I would super appreciate it too.  I just want to gather as much info as possible so that when we do commit to a decision we can do it in as informed a way as possible.

Links:
Rather than slap 50 links up here I am just going to provide you with one.  This is the link to my Pinterest board, Allergy Resources.  For the record, my name is not actually "Helen Highwater" but it is a fitting pseudonym none the less ;)  I also started a Pinterest board for homeschooling and preschool in addition to lots of other stuff.

what kind of moron?

What kind of moron spends like two weeks forgetting to finish packing up the final stuff that is getting mailed out of state until just under a week before Christmas?

This kind of moron.  right here.  *waves*

Bunyan and I really ramped up the stupid this year, money is tight and we not only waited too long to be able to pony express it on the slowest route possible to keep cost down, but we also were sending things to largely awkward to go in a reasonable sized box.  So while it weighed only $40 worth of rush because you are stupid, it took up $67 of rush because you are stupid space on the plane.  In essence, we were stupid.

Adding to the financial impact of this stupidity came the excitement of the post office.  The post office 6 days before Christmas.

If you look up the word stupid in the dictionary there just might be a picture of us.

Adding to my immense good fortune and incredible forward thinking, the morning I planned to go I couldn't find the Bean's sweatshirt.  He has several, all were missing.  No idea where most where, but we were lucky to find the Spider-Man one, which is his favorite after about 15 minutes of desperate searching.  So I got to the post office seven minutes after it opened.

In seven minutes approximately 474 people managed to get in line in front of us.

So we waited.

And waited.

And waaaaaited.

Only to get to the end of the wait to have a $67 stupid tax pied on top of my long wait.  But the bright side here is that Spidey-Beans made the lady behind us laugh several times and was actually well behaved for most of the wait.

What is the most wonderful time of year again?

Apple Butter, Part III and done!

Well it is that time of year, you know the one where I find myself grumbling "how does the rest of the world not find 'Baby, Its Cold Outside' creepy as hell?!" while avoiding public in general.

Also known as the Christmas season.  Humbug.

But I wanted to wrap up those apple butter gifts I started a while back for the Meatball's teachers, so I did my best to be both crafty and festive.  A girl can pretend!

I had to get some smaller jars, mine were 16 to 24 oz and I really didn't want to give each teacher that much, so I got 8 oz jars and set the bigger ones in the sink to thaw.

I was impatient, shocker, and added some warm water to the sink which made the bottom pop off of one of my big jars.  That sucked.

The Beans happily stood on a chair next to me the whole time, spoon in hand, reminding me that I could "put it in the Beansies bowl!" because he adores the crud out of apple butter now.  He was quite horrified by my telling him we were *gasp* giving it all away.

I made little cards on the computer.  I found the chalkboard tags here, and just used Microsoft Word to insert some Word Art in white and made labels for it.

Cut those out, without losing a finger.  Yay me!

Made them little hemp thread loops on top.

Tied them on to the final product after Meatball wrote names on the backs.

Poof, done.

Too bad the rest of my Christmas shopping is going to be no where near this easy!

Check me out, it is FALL and I rock

Apples, before I brutally slaughtered them into
a delicious dessert.

Have you ever heard of apple butter?  I sure hadn't.  Prior to the Beans destroying all that is good about dessert by developing allergies to the worlds greatest food combo -- peanut butter and chocolate -- I had no reason to branch out.  Then he ruined everything and I had all but given up on anything good, sweet and fattening.  Oddly enough I wasn't loosing any weight, a fact I can't explain and which is entirely off topic ...

But, then came apple butter.

Its like applesauce, but not at all good for you and way creamier.

My parents wound up buying a place with a ton of apple trees, so we needed to use them ... my kitchen (and waistline) will never be the same.

In the interest of complete transparency -- it is time consuming and messy as heck, but it is easy.  Slap on a good podcast, movie, or some music and go to town!

You can search Pintercrack for much more thorough or serious sounding recipes.  Or you can hang out here.
 

Me picking the apples.
I should have Linda Hamilton Terminator arms by now.

I started by mixing cheap wine and Sprite.  No, seriously.  It doesn't actually go into the apple butter, but I find that it makes the process more enjoyable.  Why mix?  Because I will be singing show tunes before the apples are even halfway done if I drink the cheap wine straight.  I am not much of a sipper, more of a gulper.

So I mixed my Mommy Juice, snapped my iPod in because I could hear Handy (with his whiny assed tools) Manny in the background still.  And got to work.

My apples are small, and the skin is really thin so I don't peal them.  If you are getting store bought apples you may need to peel them and won't need as many because they are probably bigger.  Don't get horribly hung up on what kind of apples to use because by the time you are done cooking them with all the spices they will all be delicious.  Just know that if you want tang, pick a tangier apple, tart or sweet same deal.

For this round of apple butter I am using ... well, I am not entirely sure what kind of apples they are.  Here is a visual of the four main "types" but I think one and four may be the same kind:

I have googled them and come up with a couple different names, but I would love to hear what you think they are.

Now to the actual instructions.  Brace yourself for my thorough, foodie level instruction giving skillz:

Step one: Wash the bird shit and bug shit off.  Seriously, why they gotta poo on my food?

Step Two: Core and slice the muthahs.  And since my apple core-er sucks, I do this with a knife.

*insert possible brief intermission for ER visit here*

Step Three: Re-fill your drink, undoubtedly it is time.  Then toss the slices of apples into your food processor.  Process until they are in small chunks, smaller they are the faster they cook.

Step Four: Dump the chunky, wet apple matter into the CrockPot.

Blurry pictures happen when someone's hands are slippery.

Step Five: Spices.  Don't ask me to measure, I don't really do that and I am already a full drink in (my cup is 32 oz) by this point so my already low standards are dipping.  I eyeball it.  If I had to guess, for a full pot I use at least a full cup of brown sugar and then coat the top of the apples with cinnamon and allspice (so like 2 to 3 teaspoons each).  Here, I offer pictures to those of you who know what you are doing ...

It is a lot more spices than I have ever seen in another recipe, but to be honest I have never heard anyone complain LOL

Step Six: Set your Crock Pot on long and low.  For mine this is the 8 hour setting.  I try to do this as early in the morning as possible because you really do want the apples cooking for 8 to ten hours.  It makes for creamier apple butter in the end.

Step Seven: Try to not eat it through out the day and feel very Martha Stewart-ey because your house smells like fall and you seem to know what you are doing.  Stir occasionally, but really, you don't want to do much.

Step Eight: When the apples are plenty squishy, start shoveling them into a blender, food processor, or be uber fancy and have an immersion blender.  I know it is a huge surprise, but I am not uber fancy and lack an immersion blender.  I blend this bad boy until it gets creamy.

Once we have blended the snot out of the apples, we are technically done.  You can eat it straight, mix it in something, jar it, or even ice cube it like this:

I do that because then the Meatball can drop an apple cube in his oatmeal and it both flavors AND cools it.

I know, you are in awe of my general bad ass glory here, aren't you?

Anyway, it does freeze well, so jar it up and store it for later so you can have apple butter year round.  One full CrockPot made 6 full pint jars.

In a few weeks I will be cute-i-fying the jars somehow in order to give them away, so I will share that later.

Cheers!

beards

"Its my Daddy and my Gramps!"

That is what the Beans had to say upon seeing this.

Now my dad has always had a beard, as far back as I remember, and Paul Bunyan has had some variation on facial hair since the day we met.  However, recently it has been a bit like a ZZTop concert round here.

Dad was growing his for the Red Sox, which I have NO grudge against because I again wept as my team made it three in my life time and won the Series.  But my husband, no matter how hard I tried to lie to myself and say it was for Boston, was not growing his beard for Papi and crew.

No, he just really is embracing the whole Paul Bunyan redneck thing.

He thinks Duck Dynasty is hilarious.  I watched it the first time and had an epiphany ... my husband is Jase.

Don't get me wrong, there are worse things, by far to be married to.  When Bunyan ain't looking, I laugh at and even with Jase, I don't particularly mind him.  But it is part of our loving banter for me to be annoyed.  There are definitely limits to my acceptance.  Like camo "bibs" on an adult man, that would be one big merther fracken limit of mine.  But the beard was okay ... it was getting a little, um, shall we say, unruly though and I might have suggested he trim it or something.

Well, I wasn't trying to be funny!  I was merely suggesting that you trim it up a little, because, well, it won't hurt you to ...

That isn't true, there are men who don't have beards, but I wasn't suggesting that you have NO beard, just maybe LESS beard ...

Well that isn't constructive at all.  I was just saying that maybe a little trim would be a good thing.  

I could go on with fake meme replies.  There are no shortage of Jase-isms that sound particularly Bunyan-like.  Many of which I agree with.

Some I find alarmingly close to the mentality he has sometimes.

Bunyan's beard isn't that long yet, but I think that is the end goal in mind and he is getting close.  He mentioned the other day that he may need beard wax or something like that, to help "control" it.  

Uh, I am not even sure what to say to THAT.

All things considered, there are worse things my husband could decide to do in order to annoy me or assert himself on.  While he may be a pain in the butt sometimes, he is my soul mate and partner in crime.  Besides, while I leave you with a quote from the "wrong" Robertson brother, we have similar parenting philosophies ...

LOL on that note, I bid you a farewell for today!

Halloween & Food Allergies

Food allergies suck.  No two ways about it, allergies in general suck.  It was really easy to get totally overwhelmed in the beginning with the Beans' diagnoses, and my own for that matter, to just be like "dude, we ain't goin' anywhere!" because the world is impossible to control.  When it is you, when you could die because of something that is invisible and common to everyone else, that totally stinks.

When it is your kid?  Man, I have no words to adequately explain it.

But it is critical to Bunyan and I that we teach Beans and Meatball (who has food sensitivities, though not allergies) how to navigate the world independently.

Then holidays like Halloween come along and its like someone punted you between the legs.

Too graphic?

Okay, how bout this, Halloween comes along and just fucks it all up?  No, still too strong?  Well my point is that we have a lot of food related holidays and celebrations in our society and it really does a number on my "don't want to face it!" head-in-the-sand wishes.

We navigated Easter, but Halloween is a doozey.

Or is it?

I was so anxious leading up to Halloween ... and I am not sure why exactly.  Maybe this year was just stupidly easy and I got lucky?

We did not buy any candy.  That was the first relief.  It sucked too, because it meant I had none to steal, but I supposed that may be a blessing in disguise.

Since we weren't handing out candy, I hit the dollar store for these bad boys:

Glow bracelets!  Seriously, we were quite the popular house!  No one was like "where's the candy?" Everyone, parents AND kids alike, loved the glow bracelets.

Meatball also dressed up as a haphazard scarecrow and scared the crap out of soccer moms who were escorting their kids.

Seriously, he scared more parents than he did children.

But that brings me to the second awesome point -- we didn't take anyone trick or treating this year.  Meatball was old enough to like scaring people and Beans has no idea it is even an option.

So I lucked out there, but I already have some planning in for next year if my luck runs out by then.  Since Meatball knew he was being denied candy overall, I promised him an exchange.  Net year we will actually swap any candy that is obtained if either kid trick or treats with a toy or small gift of some kind.  This year both boys picked Legos and were plenty happy with that.

Also, I plan to make use of this if we get candy and need to offload it in a good way.  How cool is that, our house stays safe and troops get some goodies?  Deal!

Overall, I think I am still new enough to the allergy world to panic when events crop up.  The holidays are a real witch to deal with, but for every frustrating situation I encounter there are another 10 supportive people who want to help and accommodate us if possible.  If I could tell the panicky me taht was convinced my child would be doomed to rice cakes and celery for life anything, I would certainly start with "chill, it will be okay.  Normal is relative, you will discover a new normal."

Our "normal" is glow bracelets and that just isn't so terrible.

bladder capacity & toy baths

I may not be a real scientist, but I play one on the internet.  Hello, I am a "rocket surgeon" y'all!  So being all scientific-ey the other day I realized I can visually represent the Beans' bladder capacity for you visually.

Before we get to that, have you seen this?

Or hows abouts this?

So true.  So very, very true.  In my case, the Beans did not actually escape his prison, he just decided to punish me for putting him in it.  I should have been alerted by the sudden silence.  I should have, but I wasn't observant enough.

Now to the scientific bladder capacity part -- just how much pee can a two and a half year old's bladder hold?

Enough to contaminate all of this when he puts his mind to it.

To be fair and maintain scientific transparency, there was smearing action before I realized what was happening.

Of course, my giving his toys a bath was so cool, so he naturally added more to it.  Dumped a whole bucket of Duplos before I could stop the little monstrosity.

This is totally the crap that should be in parentage books, but is strangely absent ...