Day 13: A recovery day

Ellie and I spent today recovering from whatever threw us off course the past couple of days. I strongly suspect the carrot juice, but really it's anybody's guess. My hope is that tonight will go well so we can go ahead and trial ghee tomorrow. Because I am deeply afraid of cow's milk at this point, I've made ghee out of goat milk butter, which is not going to be sustainable because that stuff is expensive!

If it really was the carrot juice, I feel like I have more to learn about candida. I have always had a suspicion that both of us or at least I have some candida issues because lots of sweet foods have been problems in the past, including SCD/GAPS legal foods like pear sauce and apple cider. Actually one of the reasons I was so happy to discover GAPS was I felt like the SCD community (hope I'm not hurting any feelings here!) could be overly focused on sweet foods and on using SCD ingredients to make Standard American Diet foods, thus not really learning a new way of eating. So as much as I've come to hate broth and soup, I'm also kind of loving it because we're learning a whole new way of eating.


Last night, after several epically disastrous bedtimes in a row I decided to have some red wine (GAPS-legal, but not allowed on Intro). I haven't had a drink in 6 months or more and it was delicious! Ellie always had a rough time if she nursed soon after my having wine so Ian and I agreed that he would take over baby duty for the night. I'm sure he's regretting that offer this morning! Ellie was up for hours and was incredibly difficult for him to console. There was a time when she was night weaned and would welcome him at night. She loved being rocked and sung to by daddy. But in the past few months things have been so rough for her that we took the easy way out and went back to night nursing. So she was not happy to see daddy last night and kept him up for a marathon of rocking and singing. Poor guy.

Sometimes I have moments where I fantasize about quitting nursing and eating whatever I want (starting with an entire chocolate cake), but then I realize how easy nursing makes my life in many ways. On a typical night Ellie wakes up - I go in and nurse her - and 20 minutes later she's peacefully back asleep in her crib. If Ellie is reacting to a food or experiencing die-off and she is so needy it is overwhelming, we can sit on the couch and nurse and be at peace with each other. It is a magical and beautiful thing that we can share.

This morning Ellie and I went to our La Leche League toddler meeting and got that extra jolt of happy nursing energy we needed. I've been going to meetings off and on since she was little so the leaders know our story. I reported that we were still on our diet, having switched from SCD to GAPS, and that she was growing and overall doing well. Several of the leaders were incredibly kind and said I was doing a great job and that they admired all that I had learned and done. People like this - who are generous with praise - are such a life-saver for me. I hope I can be that person to a struggling nursing mama someday.