On the Right Path

The change in my son these last three weeks have been amazing. I look at how far we've come and where we started and am so happy at our journey. It's been a long journey and I know it's far from over, but it's nice to see my son enjoying and participating in activites instead of climbing the rafters or crawling under chairs.
J has always been a bit behind on speech, but by the time he was 2-1/2, my husband and I were about to pull our hair out with his behavior. He would constantly try to run away from us when we were out and about, wouldn't listen for anything and couldn't sit still for more than 1 second. My husband thought we just needed to be tougher on him and I think he was partly right, I am a softy, but I just felt in my gut there was more going on. I began to look at food addititves, mainly artificial sweetners and wasn't liking what I was reading. I decided to cut all artificial sweetners from his diet. I quickly noticed a change. While it was far from where we wanted to be, I was happy we made an improvement. Since J had a milk allergy, I had him tested for other food allergies as well. The doctors we went to classified him as "high risk" for ADD and wanted to put him on all kinds of supplements. I remember sitting in one doctors office in particular wanting to run out of the office as the doctor was talking. I was not buying that the answer was to pump him full of supplements. The allergy tests came back a month or so later and he did have a few allergies, but nothing severe so I began looking at other preservatives, dyes and additives.
Over the next year and a half I really started questioning a lot of the things in foods. My moms group had Lisa Greene, author of Processed Kids, speak at our meeting one time and I identified with many of her stories about her son. I began slowly moving to less and less processed foods and making sure things didn't have a lot of additives, which pushed me into the organic world.
About two weeks ago, I picked up a book called Real Food, What to Eat and Why by Nina Planck and my view on food completely changed. What she said really made a lot of sense to me. Luckily I have access to a local dairy that sells raw milk, so we switched to raw milk, low processed cheeses, butter and cream. I stopped shopping at traditional grocery stores and started shopping at Whole Foods, buying their organic items only (they do sell convential items too so be sure to check the label if you want to go 100% organic). It's tough to keep our budget in check at WF, but it is doable. Especially if you stay away from processed foods and shop mainly produce and bulk bins. I can't wait for farmers markets to start back up in May so I can shop there instead of WF, but for now, it's Whole Foods.
Making this switch has been AMAZING for my son. I can't say how proud I was of him this morning at church, sitting on the stage with all the other kids listening to the children's message (a first for us). Even 2 months ago, this would have been a disaster. He would have been messing with all the band instruments, wires, even climbing up and down the three steps the kids sit on. Now, he is 3, going on 4, so he did fidget a bit, but tried to listen as best he could, follow directions, and answer questions. Since making the switch he has also stopped complaining his tummy hurt, a daily occurance before. I'm not sure if it's the milk, decrease in processed foods, or removal of pesticides since going organic, but it's probably a bit of all three. Obviously this path isn't easy, I spend a lot of time in the kitchen (mainly cleaning :-), but it has been so worth it. I know this isn't a "fix-it" solution either, but we are all becoming healthier for it which isn't a bad thing.