Last month in review

February has been a whirlwind around here and it flew by so fast! By far the biggest news of this month was that Michael was diagnosed with something called eosinophilic esophogatis (EoE). To make it simple, his body has been mounting an immune response in his esophagus for many years now. Over time that has caused his esophagus to shrink causing him to choke on his food frequently. The good news is, it's totally treatable. The bad news? It's usually caused by a food allergy. After a few weeks on steroids to reducing the inflammation, Michael was able to start noticing reactions to certain foods and the culprit was...wheat.

After bemoaning the loss of wheat from his diet for a few days, we both got things together and started his gluten free lifestyle (yes, his not ours. The girls and I aren't joining him fully on this journey but dinners at our house are now always gluten free affairs). Surprisingly it hasn't been as bad as I thought. There a tons of naturally gluten free dinners and dinners we've always eaten that I've easily adapted to be gluten free. Breakfast and lunch have been a bit harder but doable. Baked goods are a whole different story and I'm only just beginning to dabble in that. My first attempt at gluten free corn bread was just plain nasty. But, after the addition of a Blendtec (LOVE!) to our house this week, I've been able to mill by own GF flours and made a pretty tasty GF pumpkin bread tonight:)

One of the great things about Mike going gluten free was it gave me the push I needed to eliminate most of the processed foods from our diet. For a while I've been slowing making more things from scratch instead of buying the processed versions, but this has sped up the process. While we're not giving up processed foods entirely, we're getting rid of all of the ones we feel are most harmful (ie - have unpronounceable ingredients, long lists of ingredients, lots of added fat/salt/sugar/etc). Things like tortillas, cereals, some crackers, etc will continue to be purchased, but frozen foods, cream of anything soup, etc have been eliminated. I'm loving it!

Now on to the princesses...

Eliza has been so adorable this month. I love this age and seeing them learn new things daily. Some of the cutest things she has been doing lately...

She is becoming quite the comedian. Here she is fake sleeping. She is fake snoring but of course peeking to see if you're paying attention! 

If we forget to say a prayer to bless the food, Eliza yells "Payers! Prayers!" at the top of her lungs. If you get seconds even she is yelling for you to say a prayer again:)

 One Friday Eliza decided she had to join ballet. So put on this skirt all by herself and imitated different steps. It was adorable!

Have you ever seen such skinny baby legs!?!

 Eliza has also decided she wants to be potty trained. She steals Hazel's panties all the time and puts them on, sits on the potty, and cries when you put a diaper on her. I'm glad she's ready! Now I just need to find a few days to focus on potty training with her.

Hazel's had a good month too. I took her to see her first ballet! I think I was more excited about it than she was:) We went to see BYU perform Sleeping Beauty. We were even able to meet up a friend I danced with at BYU and her daughter. It was surreal watching them perform and thinking how we were up on that stage not too long ago. Hazel really enjoyed it too!

 

I love how she knows she's supposed to be looking at the camera but can't take her eyes of the dancer!

 Here's just an adorable picture of sweet Hazel with her new princess quilt that Gram Holly made her.

Michael and I rounded off the month with a date to the BYU v. Gonzaga basketball game. Of course he was rooting for the wrong team (and they won) but it was a fun night anyways!