Sickness and peanut butter

It's finally happened.

Our little one has gotten sick.

He almost made it 10 months without any illness! Alas, for my hubby caught a cold or something from his employee, and that made it's way to That Boy. We've been mostly battling just a fever. But still, a fever of 102.8 is still quite a new thing to battle! He's been handling it ok-ish. As long as I'm constantly holding him. And as long as he has his paci. Or is nursing. ...it's been a long few days.

Mama's little sickie

But my hubby is doing a bit better! His fever has been fluctuating a LOT, and all our Tylenol expired ages ago. (we use it sooo often. Our bottle expired in 2009 and we haven't used it since then to even notice!) Thankfully I've been doing more homeopathic stuff, and we've discovered that for sleeping purposes, a damp washcloth with lavender and peppermint essential oils dabbed on it help to reduce the fever and relax him. Huzzah for that!

So what's a Mama gonna do, with two sickies in her house to take care of? How is she supposed to keep functioning?

Well, I've discovered Pinterest. Finally. And I found the most amazing recipe EVER. Averie of loveveggiesandyoga has this amazing, amazing recipe for peanut butter chocolate chunk cookies. And they're naturally gluten free! No flour! I want to share them with my neighbor, but her daughter is allergic to eggs. I'm stubborn, these cookies are amazing, and they MUST be shared! So I altered the recipe.

Behold, the tweaked recipe for egg free scrumptiousness!

1 cup peanut butter
1/2 cup honey
1/2 cup brown sugar
1/4 cup applesauce
1 TBSP vanilla
1 tsp baking powder
4 tsp coconut flour
4 oz dark chocolate bar

1.) Preheat oven to 350
2.) Mix all but the chocolate together well.
3.) Chop chocolate in chunks.
4.) Mix into batter. Pour into a container and fridge it for a minimum of 2 hours. (you can fridge it up to 5 days)
5.) Roll dough into balls and drop onto a cookie sheet that's covered with a parchment paper.
6.) Bake in preheated oven for 13ish minutes.
7.) Cool for 5 minutes.
7.) ENJOY



And here's the original recipe, so you can peruse her blog of yummies! Go make these cookies. Now.
http://www.loveveggiesandyoga.com/2013/01/peanut-butter-chocolate-chunk-cookies.html

Gluten connected to Itchiness-makes sense to me!

http://health.yahoo.net/caring/10-things-your-skin-says-about-your-health

This article made me so happy! Now I know I'm not crazy! Before I got put on my purge diet, I had these horrible, dry, itchy patches on my shoulder, mid back, and thumb/wrist area. HORRIBLE. I would literally rub the skin raw by scratching it myself, rubbing it on my jeans, the carpet, anything textured enough to make it stop even temporarily. Then, when I wanted to lose weight and I saw my nutritionalist, he said I'm sensitive to wheat and should avoid it for 90 days. (I thought my carb love affair had ended, and spent several weeks moping around the house, depressed over missing bread and cookies. Ha! How things have changed!) Well, I discovered that to avoid wheat, it's easiest to find things that are gluten free. So everywhere I went, I told people I'm gluten free. Those 90 days, after the first couple weeks where my system was purging, I had no more itch! Not thinking of this significance, I had some Christmas cookies at a friend's house. They tasted good-sat in my stomach like lead-and after my gluten hangover the next morning, I realized my shoulder had itchy, rashy bumps again!

Well, well, and the article draws a link to the two. If only I'd been bright enough to connect those dots awhile ago!

Thankfully, since I've been back on avoiding gluten again, my shoulder and thumb are slowly lessening their maddening itchiness. Now I know though, if I want to go crazy, sure, I can eat that cookie my friend made, I can have that soup from the restaurant, I can have a bread sample in the store. But I will pay the price with my sanity later. If that piece of gluten-infested-food is really worth my sanity, then sure, I can have some. But I better make sure it's worth it!

And on that note, now that I'm thinking about foods, I think I'll make some cookies while I wait for my sis-in-law to get home. TBG and I are helping out this week with her at home. I have a valid excuse to make breads, cookies, muffins, foods that are high in carb! She's craving them now that she's on a gluten free diet, and I'm more than happy to fill that nasty gluten void! ^_^