My Silver Lining

One of the blogs I follow regularly is that created by Kristen about her daughter Cayman. For the past few days, Kristen has been blogging about the silver linings in her day to day situations. I thought how I longed to see the silver lining in our current situation with seizures. There really isn’t anything happy about them or enjoyable or anything. But the more research I did, the more I realized how I can help Tyler on a daily basis. I realized that many parents had success in reducing the number of daily seizures simply by changing the child’s diet. Simply by eliminating things that we shouldn’t be eating anyway such as artificial colors, flavors, and dyes. Could this be my silver lining in this nightmare? I am hoping so. No I KNOW so!!!!

Yesterday I went through the cabinets and started throwing away things such as pop tarts and nutri-grain bars, and some condiments. I found myself spending almost an hour in the organic food section of our grocery store picking out new snacks for Tyler. While I do a lot of cooking from scratch, there are some things that he eats that are certainly not good for him. He is strictly a finger food kid so snacks for school are limited to fig newtons and nutri-grain bars. His breakfast choices are also limited to finger foods such as bagels, english muffins, pop tarts, and homemade waffles and pancakes. And for desserts if I haven’t made cookies or brownies, then he is limited to oreos, store made cookies and brownies, and of course fruit.  I was shocked to find out the number of artificial flavors and ingredients in condiments, cookie mixes, bread mixes and more. I guess I have become naive to this but then again, I never had a reason to thoroughly read a label.

So sure, I could take this situation as a very expensive situation as we need to completely restock our cabinets or I could see the silver lining. And I chose to see the silver lining. Why should I be putting these chemicals in our bodies let alone his? ********** This is a warning as this part is disturbing….the artificial flavor vanillin that is used in oreo cookies comes from paper mill waste!!!! *******Why is it that over 60 years ago, there weren’t these ingredients and there weren’t the number of health issues as there are today? Sure it’s going to be a drastic lifestyle change but it is so worth it. Yes Tony and I need to really watch ourselves now, as we will be using real butter instead of Country Crock, and we will be using real maple syrup instead of “artificially flavored” syrup and these clearly pack more of a caloric punch than the lower fat chemicals we have been using. But when I sit and read how thousands of parents have seen a drastic improvement in their child’s temper, behavior, and overall well being when eliminating these simple ingredients, how could this not be good for us? And I read that in many cases it has helped improved nystagmus! I am not counting on this as the be all and end all cure to all of Tyler’s issues. But, if it can help him just a bit, and maybe we can reduce some of his medications, and make him healthy since everything is all natural, why wouldn’t I make this change??? Thank you Tyler for once again opening my eyes and seeing what is important. Thank you for seeing that while you continue to struggle daily, that Mumma and Daddy can try help you in addition to your medications by eliminating chemicals from your daily diet. Thank you for pointing out my silver lining in this chaos. I love you.