Don't let the photo fool you. I'm not really a cat person. Thank goodness Crash, our cat, doesn't know that about me.

We just finished reading a book about the Tuskegee Airmen so that we'll be prepared for tomorrow morning. And Rutledge has his speech evaluation early, so it's a tight schedule pretty much all day: 8:30 speech, 11:00 Aviation Museum for 2 hour program, 3:00 piano, 5:00 modern dance. Great stuff, just a lot of it, and a fair amount of driving up. Thankfully, two of these things are walking distance from home, which is a goal of mine these days.

The piano practice is going quite well. Things can get sort of frustratingly interesting because I hadn't quite realized that I was going to have to play along with her and be right on top of her practice, but now I feel like a fool for not knowing this beforehand. Duh--of course I have to! If I didn't, she would be practicing all week on the wrong notes and with the wrong hands. She is still super happy with what she can do and has been working ahead, which is probably not a good idea. We'll see how the lesson goes tomorrow. Her favorite part, go figure, is the theory book, which she called "Piano Math."

Instead of going to bed tonight, we had a lengthy practicum on probability and statistics...also called strategizing with Yahtzee. I shared my own strategies (and take it with a grain of salt, I'm not mathematician, but I have beaten the entire adventure game now), and lots of math operations were performed--judging risk, comparing numbers and benefits of going for multiples of a kind over taking a scratch on some things to leave open the possibility of higher rolls in the future, and simple addition as we edged up toward that magic 63 upper bonus. For a while, I felt like I should be reading to them instead--that this would constitute a better use of our time (okay, if the truth be told, a good use of everyone's time is probably going right to bed at a reasonable hour!). In the end, though, this was time well spent and will at the least probably improve their enjoyment of this particular dice game.

It is so freaking cold here, and I'm getting to be one of those stodgy folks who gripe about not handling the weather well. But it makes me miserable, especially when we're not getting the pleasure of a snow day! It probably doesn't help that we've gotten a bit lazy about even wearing a coat lately because we're all so tired of unproductive winter weather. I'm still trying to fit in a ski trip, and it just hasn't worked out so far. Maybe next week. Gotta check that schedule. I am getting nervous that it simply won't happen and our tickets will be for naught. I sure hope not.

Last night I was online until way too late, reading about improving my compliance with being gluten free. I wanted to know more about the healing process and about the range of possibilities for detoxification and how long it might take and what the symptoms might be. I'm heading fast for my original "reconsideration" deadline, and though in many ways things aren't exactly better and in some they might actually be worse after going gluten free, my gut, and not my literal one, is saying loud and clear that I want to keep going. Since dropping gluten, I feel like I've had *more* headaches than I typically do. My stomach has hurt a lot. Before it used to be upset more often, crampy more often, but now it simply feels dull pain quite a bit, something it never really used to do. The rational or logical response would probably be to say (1) too bad, the diet didn't work; gluten must not be your problem or (2) Hmmm. Maybe you weren't broken to begin with, so there was really nothing to fix. Your GI issues are nothing but stress. (3) You didn't eradicate all those pesky little hidden sources of gluten, so you weren't truly gluten free, so no wonder you didn't experience miraculous, vibrant health. The truth is, maybe all of these are true. Or maybe two out of three. I have no doubt that I've been a victim of the steep learning curve of this lifestyle. I feel like I've been pretty careful, but early on I had some high-profile spaceout moments I've already mentioned, I intentionally ate gluten twice in order to try to make myself have something to react to with the blood test, and I'm positive I've eaten some cross-contaminated items, sometimes unintentionally, and once or twice taking my chances because I was really, really hungry and it was a while until I could get to my own food. Then there's that whole matter of the pounds of lipstick women supposedly eat each year. I am truly not sure that I've worn lipstick more than once in the past 6 weeks, but I'm not sure about the other makeup I might have worn from time to time (works out to probably once a week, if that, but still...little bits, little bits, that's what makes us fail). My shampoo could be glutening me. My children's shampoo could be glutening me (can't help but kiss Rutty's sweet little head). I still make gluten items in my kitchen while I try to purge my pantry. So I have more to aspire to with complicity. But from what I've read, my stomachaches, headaches, and less than earth-shattering response seem kind of typical for people who are undergoing the healing process. It's not cool of me to feel this, but the whole concept of healing crises is really irritating to me. I get it--that's not the problem--it's just that it leaves open this constant Big Uncertainty. If you take a remedy and you don't get better, then maybe your body hasn't fully processed it yet, maybe it's the die-off of this or that, maybe it's the toxicity leaving your body. If you get worse, then maybe you're really getting better, even if it looks like the opposite. Call me a simple gal, but I really love it when improvement looks like, well...improvement.

At any rate, I'm going to keep going. I'm hoping that what is going on is that my intestinal villi are growing and not feeling especially tolerant of things like lactose and soy. Or that all the nasty poison in my life is working its way out of wherever it is. And maybe I wasn't such a mess that there's really a lot to create drama in the healing. A lot of gluten happiness stories I hear seem to involve people so debilitated by something that they can barely move from bed or were so ill they were having a hard time imagining living the rest of their lives. Nearly instantly they had amazing energy and lost all kinds of diagnoses that were frightening. I don't have any frightening diagnoses. I'm not particularly debilitated. I have things in my health that are mildly annoying, but not exactly life-disrupting. So things are likely to be subtle for me, especially if it legitimately can take years to fully recover; people with the unmistakable early health miracles probably still have some little things that could be better. Still, for me, it's upward, onward. Conquering that bread tomorrow night. Got my Zojirushi custom settings for the bread I'm going to make, and I'm ready to try again.

Man oh man am I hungry right now, though. My stomach is shouting out through the night for someone to feed it. I still don't do things like eat at midnight if I want to sleep soundly, so I'm going to keep telling the darn thing to shut up.