We found our sweet little boy hiding under a terrible veil of gluten

My last post spoke about the connection I had made personally between the gluten in my food, and the moods that I experience as a result. After determining that there is definitely a cause & effect relationship there, we also discovered that our son suffers from much the same reaction to gluten.

While we knew that age two was simply training for age three, and that three is training for the teen years (and all those other axioms about behavior which people like to throw about when they learn the age of your child) we had an inkling that Jamey's erratic and devilish behavior was being caused by something more than normal development.

What we discovered one day after a long drive (aka the Sunday nap), during which Jamey's only snack was a bag of Goldfish crackers, was that gluten renders him almost completely incapable of rational behavior. When he started acting up after returning home from the drive/nap we tried a time out. This quickly deteriorated into a complete meltdown. He was spitting, screaming, and stripping. He could not be contained to his time out corner. He could not be consoled. He was beyond all rational thought and behavior. Even when we abandoned the time out, he couldn't really calm down.

Fast forward several weeks, and we now have a child who behaves entirely different. If we screw up and give him anything with gluten in it, we don't have to read labels to find out what happened. We know by his behavior. He spits, screams and melts down.

But since we've been avoiding gluten like the plague, he is one of the sweetest three-year-olds I've ever seen. Sure, he's still three and he still behaves like a three year old, but his behaviors make sense. He's upset for a reason now, rather that completely at random.

It's hard to imagine what some parents must go through if their children are suffering in this same way, and they never find out why. So please, if you know anyone who might benefit from reading this, feel free to share this article with them. Tell them to start researching gluten and mood. Have them contact me. Just do what you can to help them so that they might enjoy their children as much as we enjoy ours.

Q: Can gluten affect my mood? - A: Yes!

Again, it's been a while since I last posted. I'm starting to think that this just might be the norm for me when it comes to this whole blogging thing.

Today's post is almost more of a journal entry though than my previous posts. I'm beginning to realize that perhaps I've been in a bad place for quite some time without even realizing it.

I've always known that my personality was fairly dead-pan. I never really thought much of it, and often blamed it on therapy sessions I had for a few years as a kid. But I'm starting to re-think that now.

About three months ago I started a gluten-free & dairy-free diet, and my life has changed dramatically. I have lost over 20 pounds, and my mood has improved. I have more energy and motivation. I get more joy out of life, rather than just marking time most days.

A couple of days ago, I had a bad evening and over-reacted to a simple issue. This over-reaction got me thinking about my moods, and how they have changed since going gluten-free. I started to wonder if perhaps there was a link between gluten and mood. I had done quite a bit of searching on the net about gluten-free diets and recipes, the results of which were almost always accompanied by discussions of the physical effects that gluten can have on those who are either gluten intolerant, or have full blown celiac disease. What these results didn't show, was the link between gluten and mood. Although maybe I just didn't see that it was an issue for me and so I ignored it.

So after this episode with my over reaction, I started to wonder if it was possible that the little bits of gluten that I'd been cheating with over the preceding few days, might have been the cause. I woke up this morning, and did a Google search for "can gluten affect mood". What a search it was. Apparently, this has been a known issue since at least the 60s, but for some reason it doesn't get mentioned when you search for gluten by itself. I had to specifically search for gluten and mood together before I found any of this information.

At this point, I am fairly certain that not only does gluten tear up my bowels, but for my entire life up until about three months ago, it may have also been tearing up my mind.


Further reading:
http://www.drkaslow.com/html/gluten-brain_connection_.html
http://holisticprimarycare.net/topics/topics-a-g/digestive-health/1232-in-a-glutinous-mood-exploring-the-gluten-allergy-a-depression-connection
http://crystaljnelson.blogspot.com/2011/10/gluten-attack-and-mood-swings.html

Missed connections

Our wedding photographer (Craig Mitchelldyer) is on Facebook and I've been following him for some time now. His posts are often non-work-related because he's just a normal guy. However, he linked to an article today from another wedding photographer that puts a little more perspective on what it means to be such an intimate part of someones life, but only for such a small part of it.

The article, Remains of the Day in the Washingtonian was written by photographer Matt Mendelsohn.

After reading the article, and as a member of the wedding vendor community, I must say that his feelings are dead-on. We often find ourselves wondering what our customers are up to after the big day. We have a sense of connection, but it almost always gets lost on the day of the wedding (or the day we ship the product).

We rarely hear how the wedding actually went, or what the guests thought of the menus, table numbers, etc. at the reception. We often have brides telling us that they'll send us pictures of the event, but rarely receive them.

There really is almost a sense of lost friendship once it's all said and done. We've built a bond with these people, become a part of their day, and then it's done. Just like that. A flash in the pan, and we usually don't even get to see that much.

So here is the full comment that I left on Craig's Facebook wall in response to the article. I didn't realize how much I was going to write until I started...


Amazing article Craig. Thanks so much for sharing.

When you met us and shot our wedding back in November of '08, I was working in IT, and my wife Amanda wasn't working. We didn't have a ton of money to spend on the wedding and received a lot of financial help from her parents. Her mom (a self-trained graphic designer) helped us design our invitations and we printed and cut them ourselves.

She had been doing this for a few months prior to us needing them as a hobby/business on Etsy. She continued to do this throughout the time leading up to our wedding as a way to help finance the event. It eventually grew into a full-time business for her.

Fast forward a year and a half after our wedding, and our son Jameson was born. Four months later, my mother-in-law is burnt out / bored with the wedding stationery business that she's created.

At the same time, Amanda and I are desperately searching for a way for me to quit my job and stay home with our son. So we talked with my mother-in-law, and decided to try taking over the business so that I could stay home, and she could move on to something that was more interesting for her.

Now two and a half years later, Amanda runs the stationery business, and I am a full-time stay at home dad!

We often have some of the same thoughts about our customers as what Matt expressed in this article. We feel as though we are so much a part of their lives right up to the wedding, and then nothing... They're off of our radar and we rarely hear any more about them.

Of course a few of them return to order other products in the future, or they refer a friend, and we get to hear a glimpse of their story from the friend's perspective. But that's it.

Amanda has made some friends that she keeps in contact with here on Facebook, but beyond that we truly have no idea what has happened to the fairy tale that we helped produce.

We are working on putting together a wedding map on our website to help showcase some of the products that we've sold, and where in the world they've ended up. We hope to be able to include some small tidbits of the story of each couple as well, but so much of that will have to come from them. It just seems like it would make the whole thing more real, more personal, more interesting. I hope that our customers will feel the same way and help us to build a living map of the stories that we've been a part of.

Amanda and I certainly cherish the memories that you helped us capture on our wedding day. We still go back to the Edgefield as often as possible, and walk around the grounds. We stop on the hill behind the Winery Wing and look at the water tower. We walk through the vineyard and always take our own pictures in the same place that you took some for us (including the one you used for the DVD label). We hang out on the balconies and remember the first kiss.

We remember the rainbow that happened just before she walked down the aisle. I couldn't see it from where I was out in front of Blackberry Hall, but she could from the back door where she was waiting to make her entrance. You were inside waiting for her to come in, so you weren't able to get a shot of it, but it is still one of our favorite memories.

All in all, the memories that photographers help their clients capture are often the ones that get remembered the best, because there is always physical proof to remind us. The memories that don't get captured, the ones that live only in our minds, and the lives that continue to create more memories are the true reason for the day.

But without the memories that do get captured by the photographers, those moments can only live on as long as someone remembers them well enough to tell someone else. Photographs can help so much with keeping those memories alive. And Matt is right, it's not all about the little details of the wedding day. Those are all just for show. The details that truly matter are those that happen after the cameras leave, the fairy tale is over, and life goes back to being normal (whatever that is).

Oh look, a shiny new address!

You may have noticed that Lucky Dad is now located at a new address. Well, I finally took the plunge and registered my own domain www.brianheston.com. So, from here on out, Lucky Dad will be a part of my personal website rather than Blogger/BlogSpot and can be found at lucky-dad.brianheston.com.

Thanks for following,
Brian

We have a new office!

Well, our office project is nearly complete. We still have a little bit of finish work to do and a heat pump to be installed, but Amanda is now doing all of her work in the new office.

The building started out looking like this:

And now it looks like this:

You can see all of our progress pictures here: The New Office

I haven't kept up on the blog, because we've been focusing everything on getting this done. It's been a huge learning experience for me. Amanda says she'll never ask for another project like this again. And I'm pretty sure my father-in-law wishes he hadn't retired! :-)

Overall though, this has been an awesome summer and all of the hard work has finally paid off. I'm hoping that, with this project pretty much behind us now, we can get back to our regularly scheduled programming and life will return to normal again.

One of the best parts of this whole thing, is that Jamey finally gets his own room. Until Amanda was able to move into the new space, Jamey had been stuck in about a 6'x10' room with no closet. Now he has a much larger room with space for all of his toys (which gets them out of our living room) and a closet. He loves it!

I have taken over his old room as my office/hobby room, which should be plenty of space for now.

We had moved everything out of the building and into our house (and my in-law's garage) prior to the renovation. Now that we each have our own spaces again, we can all get our things organized and not be tip-toeing around each other anymore. We finally have our house back! :-)

I'm hoping to be able to keep up on this a little more often now that the project is complete. Jamey has come so far, and there are so many things that I really should have been writing about but just never took the time. And the business continues to amaze me with how well it's doing (thanks to all of Amanda's hard work). Life certainly has changed around here. And it's definitely for the better!