Obligatory Intro

Our household (two families) consists of two picky kids (a 7 year old boy and a 4 year old girl, hereafter referred to as Boy and Medium Girl), my husband (Caveman) who is working at losing weight via a low-carb diet, a breastfeeding BabyGirl who is sensitive to many things (dairy for sure, probably eggs, wheat, legumes, and possibly tomatoes or something else), a formerly-picky autistic teenager who has been on a gluten and casein free, low carbohydrate diet for several years, her mother B who is neither picky nor on any particular diet, and me. I'm not picky (Caveman would argue with that, but really, I'm not particularly), and if it weren't for the baby wouldn't need any sort of special diet. I'm losing weight a bit more than I probably should be while breastfeeding.

That Baby is awfully lucky she's so cute.

Anyways, we started the paleo diet as a household a few months ago, as it both seemed to make a lot of sense and fit well with our varying dietary needs. Even the non-autistic members of the household have noticed negative reactions to grains - tiredness, grumpiness, behavior problems from the kids (and adults!), weight gain... There seemed to be no reason to keep it as part of our diet.

Except sometimes it's really hard to find things everyone is willing and able to eat. Hence this blog.

We're not perfect at the paleo thing. We do our best with a limited budget, but our best sometimes includes excessively processed meats and such. Everyone but Autistic Girl and I (and, by extension, the baby) still eats dairy. I eat chocolate. Yummy yummy chocolate. I find myself saying "This would be better with a spoonful of cocoa powder to just about everything. I considered naming the blog that, actually. I like carob, too. I especially like carob and chocolate together, which may defeat the purpose, but tastes great.

I also have a bit of a sugar problem, in case that isn't obvious from the past few sentences (as I'm not eating straight unsweeteed cocoa, you know), but I've cut way down recently and that's improving. Paleo helped with that, I think. A few weeks after we started the diet, I woke up one day and didn't particularly feel the need for sugar in my coffee (though I still do it sometimes, such as when I stick a spoonfull of cocoa in it). Now, I tend to have a hard time turning it down if it's there, but I don't go out of my way for it either, and a lot of the processed stuff is just not seeming that appealing.

Also, when you eat a piece of cake and the baby starts in on inconsolable screaming a few hours later, it gets less appealing. Especially since it wasn't that great, anyways.

We hope to get a cow or two soon, as we have about an acre of pasture that needs chewing up through the summer. We're also working on chickens, possibly pigs and/or goats, and a garden. That could be interesting.