Vacation is For Fun

 

We accomplished all of our 'must-do's' on our visit to Universal Studios Orlando for my daughter's 16th birthday.

 

She used a wand to cast spells around Diagon Alley and Hogsmeade.

 

We took a wild ride through Gringotts bank.

 

After touring Hogwarts' interior, we experienced a high flying adventure over the castle and its environs.

 

We watched the Frog Choir and visited Olivander's Wand Shop.

 

We met the Knight Bus driver and the conductor of the Hogwarts Express.

 

She drank Butterbeer in Diagon Alley. Twice. She bought a bag of candy from Honeydukes in Hogsmeade Village.

 

 

 

 

She carried that bag with her and sampled Sherbet Lemons, Fizzing Whizzbees and Gummy Frogs throughout the day.

 

Her birthday dinner at Margaritaville included a virgin strawberry daiquiri and a complimentary red velvet cake dessert.

 

Did we count the carbohydrates in everything perfectly? No.

 

Did the walking make her blood sugar drop so that Fizzing Whizzbees became not only fun but medicinal? Absolutely.

 

Did she enjoy every moment, sip and morsel and live to tell the tale? Yup.


It's November...Diabetes Awareness Month! My plan for this month involves stories. Simple, everyday, real-life stories about living with diabetes. I plan to tell them here as narratives, like this one, just snippets of a day with diabetes, and I plan to tell them, or stories like them, more often in the 'real world' this month when friends ask, 'How's it going,' or relatives ask what I've been up to.  

Too Much Trouble

 

I wanted a loaf of the homemade bread.

 

Probably the apple crumb, but there was also a blueberry strudel one.

 

I looked them over, picked them up, read about where they were made.

 

They were rather expensive, but they looked amazing.

 

I imagined having a slice with my coffee the next morning, or maybe for dessert that very night with tea.

 

If I bought it, though, I would have to share it.

 

Then I'd have to help figure out how many carbs were in it.

 

I'd have to wonder all night, or all morning, whether I'd guessed right.

 

I might be up giving juice at 2 a.m., or distracted every few minutes by Dexcom alerts all morning.

Chances are the bread would be good enough that my daughter would want another slice.

 

The whole guess/wonder/deal with the outcome process would begin again.

 

We'd already had cider donuts as an afternoon treat. We'd all enjoyed random but delicious treats the night before at a marching band event.

 

I was tired of guessing carbs and dealing with the aftermath.

 

I did not bring home any bread.

 

It was too much trouble.

 

Bolus-worthy Bunny



 

 

 

 

As my daughter looked through her Easter basket yesterday she remarked,

 

"My friends all get chocolate bunnies from CVS. I'm glad mine is always homemade dark chocolate. It makes it so much more worth eating it."

 

The Easter Bunny's reasoning (as far as I understand it, though we've never met) is that if your basket is not going to be filled to the brim with candy, the candy that's in there should be worth eating... 'bolus-worthy' as it were.

 

So nestled among a few silly Easter toys, a package of baseball cards, a couple of  EOS products, an i-tunes gift card and some marigold seeds there's always a really good chocolate rabbit the Easter Bunny has picked up at a local candy store.

 





Dessert

 

 

 

The average person would only need a spoon.

Birthday Day and Other Heavy Eating Occasions

My daughter's friend had a birthday last week.  It was on the same day as mine.  The kids have found a way to skirt the school nutrition policy of 'no outside food for celebrations' by bringing in treats to share at lunch. So lunch that day included oreos, hershey kisses, doritos and munchkins.  To her credit, she ate the sandwich and grapes I packed first, but she sampled the rest as well.

For dinner we went to a Thai restaurant and she had an uncountable portion of pineapple fried rice. We came home and had mini cupcakes and cannolis for dessert.

Our household diabetes philosophy (yours may vary) allows sweets, and even junk food.  Birthdays include cake.  S'mores over the fire pit or a trip for italian ice are part of summer fun.  A little bag of chips for the walk home is o.k.  Most days include cookies or a non-dairy frozen treat before bed. Taken one at a time, or even two in one day, we're o.k. with both the questionable nutrition of it and with the diabetes challenges.

'Everything in moderation' is the general idea. But on days when moderation goes out the window, I'm left feeling torn.  Should we ever let her eat this way?

"Yes!  You can eat anything except poison...or cookies made with poison..." is one side of the coin. But she really can't eat anything and maintain the same kind of blood sugar numbers she does when she eats healthy, countable things.  Twenty carbs of oreos and doritos is not the same as twenty grapes. Half a restaurant portion of pineapple fried rice and a bakery cupcake simply can't be counted and dosed for as accurately as portions prepared, weighed and measured at home. Add the 'one more dorito because everyone else is still eating,' or the picking all the pineapple out of the fried rice despite bringing home 'half,' and the challenge increases.

Still, I lean towards letting her learn from her mistakes over outright forbidding her from eating like this. She'll encounter days with heavy eating potential for the rest of her life, so perhaps helping her develop a healthy sense of how to handle them is the answer.  Last week's birthday day was an example of how not to handle it.  And she knew it.  She was upset that her blood sugar was high for hours.  Between that lengthy high and the general junk food overload, she had some lingering indigestion into the next day.

Sometimes she makes better choices.  Last weekend, she said no to lunch out with a friend before an evening birthday party because it would consist of too much uncountable food in one day.  She's come home from parties and told us she was the only one who ate the proffered grapes or salad to balance out the junk. She will report with alarm how many cookies or cupcakes some kids consume in one sitting.

I guess it's like all things diabetes, really.  We do our best.  We try to fit the diabetes stuff into what we consider a normal, healthy lifestyle.  We try not to let it ruin our fun.  We learn from our mistakes.  And we're never quite sure we're doing it right.

Today's Menu

Breakfast

              

This is one of our protein-containing, 5+ grams of fiber cereal choices which somewhat diminish the post-breakfast blood sugar spike.  

More excitingly, I bought a whole pint (well, several pints actually) of blueberries for less than one million dollars this week!!!

Lunch

Sunflower butter to protect her peanut-free friends at lunch, with great grandma's homemade spiced pear jam, which she makes special with less sugar just for my daughter.  With an occasional substitution of pretzels or sun chips, this is lunch every day.   

Snack

Snack varies every day.  Sometimes it's more substantial, like a smoothie or peanut butter crackers.  But today she's saving room for Grandpa's birthday dinner.

Dinner

I'll smash up half a sleeve of townhouse (ritz, etc. are all fine) and mix them with 3-4 tbs. of melted butter.  I might remember to squeeze in some lemon juice and add some pepper.  The fish goes in a greased (or better yet, buttered) glass baking dish.  The cracker mixture is spread on top.  Bake at 400 for 10-15 min. until it's flaky.  Yum!

We've nicknamed this rice blend 'crazy rice,' at our house.  It's got tons of flavor and a variety of textures.  Much more fun than regular brown rice.

Grandpa's Birthday Cake

I know- all kinds of problems with this.  Its's processed beyond belief.  It contains artificial everything.  The glycemic index is off the charts.

But it's Grandpa's favorite, and a family tradition.  So we'll indulge!

Food is one of my favorite topics to read, think and talk about.  So I, for one, am looking forward to reading the rest of today's Diabetes Blog Week posts which can be found HERE!

At Least We Got A Treat

My grandmother was clumsy.  My mother was clumsy.  I have inherited this gene.  And as I get older, the consequences become more dire.  Last Wednesday's incident leads me to consider living the remainder of my days in a hamster bubble.

I was leaving a meeting at my church and walking to my car with something in each hand when I tripped and found myself airborne and parallel to the sidewalk.  With my hands full, and not as much reaction time as the slow motion vision of the incident going on in my head would suggest, my chin was the first thing to hit the sidewalk.  As I started to try to get up, I realized my chin was bleeding heavily and that my mouth and jaw had several significant injuries.

Thankfully, someone I knew came along who had been at the meeting with me.  He walked me back into the building where a friend helped me clean up and then took me to urgent care.  No stitches were needed, and x-rays showed no broken bones.  Follow-up with the dentist on Thursday showed that a disk which cushions the bones around the intersection of the right side of my jaw was intensely swollen and inflamed, making it impossible to open my mouth more than a crack.  I am still unable to chew, and brushing my teeth is torture, but with rest and a variety of treatments the problem should continue to resolve over the coming weeks. Then the dentist will be able to fix the broken teeth. 

I'm guessing you're feeling badly for me but wondering what this has to do with diabetes.  Read on:

As I lay on my sofa Thursday morning, everything hurting, the phone rang.  It was my husband calling from work, who had conferenced in my daughter calling from the nurse's office.  In tears.  "I'm 385 and I was 300 an hour ago and corrected it and we're doing jump rope for heart today so I've been jumping rope and my blood sugar won't go down and I didn't want to bother you and I know you're not supposed to talk, but I don't know what to do and the site looks pretty yucky and .... what should I do???"  

I took a deep breath (one of us had to) and mumbled through clenched teeth, "Sounds like it's probably the site.  Do you think you can do it yourself?  I'll come down there if you really need me to but if you think you can do it, now's the time to try." 

"I think I can." 

"Are you sure?"

"Yeah."

"O.k.  Make sure the nurse sits with you and watches.  Call me if you need to.  It's o.k.  And if I need to come down there, I absolutely will. But I definitely think you can do it."

When she did her first site change a couple of weeks ago, I never would have seen this particular need coming.  I envisioned a site falling out on a day trip with another family, or a failure during a night with grandparents while her dad and I were off doing something fun.  But here we were, me looking like I'd been in a prize fight and in intense pain on the sofa, and my husband an hour's commute away at work.  

It took only 2 more phoned in questions to accomplish the task (I don't have to prime again, right? Can I leave the old site in until I get home in case it's a gusher?).  By lunch time she was in the 200's and by mid-afternoon, back under that 200 line.

As our little family reconvened around the dining room table that evening, and I sipped my pureed lentil soup through a straw, my husband decided the day needed a happy ending.  It was the warmest evening yet, with the hope of spring in the air, so I was loaded in the car and we headed to our favorite ice cream stand.  My daughter enjoyed her first italian ice of the season.  My milkshake was the most calories I'd consumed in 36 hours.  It was a well-deserved treat.