Equality Brand Potato Chips
We did our groceries at Food Basics again today. I’m not a big fan of grocery shopping but it does give me a tiny bit of retail therapy. What can I say; I love spending money!
With Jake's GFCF diet, we spend quite a bit more time shopping for food now than we did before. We read every label and search, normally in vain, for something to feed him. Eating gluten-free isn’t that hard and neither is eating dairy-free, but comibining the two has proven to be a bit of a challenge.
While reading the label on the potato chips, I discovered an interesting and disturbing trend:
Firstly, I should explain that the Food Basics brand is called Equality (part of the Fresh Obsessed group) and these products tend to cost less that brand name items and they are packaged in a rather plain blue design. We buy a lot of Equality products because we find that the quality is just as good as the food from the big names and the price is right. A lot of the products are transfat free too, which is very important to us.
So I was reading the label on a pack of the Equality brand Ripple potato chips that have a flavor that would be described as plain, regular or salt. I was pleasantly surprised to read the ingredients as potatoes, canola oil and salt.
Such simple ingredients! You wouldn’t call the chips healthy - because chips are never described as such - but the list makes me feel good about feeding them to my children who, by the way, love them. I know what’s in them and I understand each ingredient. No long words, nothing ‘hydrogenated’ and no words that end in ‘ate’ or ‘ium’ or ‘ide’.
But then I went further and looked at the flavored chips: barbeque, sour cream & onion, all dressed, etc. The ingredient list was shockingly long and confusing. Obviously, I put a pack of the plain chips in our shopping cart rather than the flavored ones!
When I got home, I tried looking up the ingredient list online but found that although the company had a website, the ingredients were not listed there. I wanted to be able to post the list here but obviously I can’t remember the details from the packet I read earlier today.
So instead, I will quote from the President’s Choice website, which is the brand from the Independant store. For the record, when we’re not shopping at Food Basic, you’ll find us at the Independant and we regularly buy their store brand as well. Their website is much more comprehensive and includes ingredients.
Here goes:
PC Thin Ripple Cut Potato Chips - Regular Flavour
Ingredients: Specially selected potatoes, vegetable oil, salt.
Sounds good! But then there’s…
PC General Tao Chicken Chips
Ingredients: Potatoes, vegetable oil (canola and/or sunflower and/or corn), seasoning [sugar, brown sugar, hydrolyzed soy and corn protein, fancy molasses, spices (including chilies, ginger), salt, maltodextrin, monosodium glutamate, onion powder, gum arabic, natural flavour (including garlic), caramel colour, sunflower oil, citric acid, glucose solids, disodium inosinate, disodium guanylate, silicon dioxide], salt.
Oh my. What does it all mean?
OK. How about organic chips?
PC Organics Regular Cut Potato Chips - Barbecue
Ingredients: Organic potatoes, organic sunflower oil, seasoning (organic sugar, organic tomato powder, sea salt, organic corn flour, organic onion powder, organic garlic powder, organic spices, natural mesquite flavour, citric acid, silicon dioxide), sea salt
And, everybody’s favorite:
PC Kettle Potato Chips - Cheddar Cheese & Green Onion
Ingredients: Potatoes, vegetable oil (sunflower and/or safflower and/or canola), seasoning [modified milk ingredients, corn maltodextrin, green onion powder, sea salt, sugar, cheddar and enzyme modified cheddar cheese solids (contain soy lecithin, hydrogenated soybean oil), yeast extract, sunflower oil, spice, garlic powder, citric acid, disodium phosphate, corn syrup solids, flavour], sea salt.
Can you understand why I chose to stick to Regular chips?
The Strength of the Canadian Dollar
Living so close to the US (we're about 5 minutes away from the bridge), we are used to seeing our fair share of American money. And we tend to be pretty aware of the exchange rate. The stores around here accept both Canadian and American tender.
Up until a couple of weeks ago, I have always known the Canadian dollar to be worth less than its American counterpart. Working in a store, we know that the total cost of a purchase will always be a few dollars less when in US funds.
But then everything changed and now the Canadian dollar is worth more than the American dollar. How strange! You should see the faces of the Americans who come into the store wanting to spend their American dollars. When we tell them the total, they'll normally ask how much it is in American money. Usually, that amount is lower. But not anymore! Now it costs more.
But this change in the trend has certainly brought about some interesting situations. For instance, Wal-Mart is now selling their greeting cards, magazines and books at the American price. Magazines have two prices listed - American and Canadian. The US price might be $4.99 while the Canadian price is $6.99. Well, now we pay the $4.99.
I bet Wal-Mart are selling more magazines, books and cards than they were before! Everyone seems to be waiting for the exchange rates to go back to "normal", but it doesn't look like they'll be doing that any time soon.
The down side is that some of my income comes from American sources. That used to be great because it calculated into more Canadian dollars, but now I get less. A few months back, $250 American became $280 Canadian. For the same amount now I only get $227.
Oh well. There are pluses and minuses, I guess.
Neat & Tidy Cottage
Stephen and I have been umming and ahhing over a gift for the kiddies for Christmas. We saw it a few months ago and put off buying it because of the vast amount of space it would take up. But it's now come down in price - from $200 to $150 - and I think we'll end up going for it.
It's the Neat & Tidy Cottage from Step 2 and it is the cutest thing ever! Jake and Abby would love it, I'm sure. They have a tent in the living room right now and play in it for ages. But it has seen better days and the material is fraying from all the abuse it takes from our two. The sturdier plastic house that we're considering will take up a whole corner of the room but, with the long, cold winter approaching, we feel like we need to get something to entertain them. And this definitely will.
So, we'll head off to Wal-Mart again some time soon and pick it up. I can't wait to see their faces!!
Lactose-free versus Non-Dairy
Today, I reaceived an email through this blog that asked me about the gluten-free casein-free (GFCF) diet that Jake is on. The person writing the email had a son who was autistic and was also on the GFCF diet. The email went like this:
- I need to know if Lactose Free Milk is good for Autism children? He won't drink soy or rice milk but now that we introduced him to Lactose Free milk he is back to drink alot of it. We have them on GfCf diet, the only thing we are having hard time with is milk and eggs.
So I went in search of an answer. Of course, since we started the diet with Jake, we've made a few mistakes and served foods that did have gluten or dairy products in the ingredients list. Sometimes, these ingredients go by other names and it can be very difficult to get it right all the time.
My research has taught me that lactose is a naturally-occuring sugar or enzyme found in cow's milk. When products are listed as 'lactose free', it means that they have had the lactose removed, catering to those who suffer with lactose intolerance. These products are still made with cow's milk and therefore still contain casein, which is what the GFCF diet for autistic children tries to avoid.
To recap, 'lactose free' does not necessarily mean 'non-dairy' or 'casein free'.
I wrote back to the writer of the email and passed on the information that I'd found. I also stressed that I am no pro and that they should verify the facts with someone in the know.
There is such a huge wealth of information out there on the internet, but there's no telling who we can trust to get it right.
Aging Sucks
My Mum and stepfather came by today. It had been a few weeks since they'd last seen Jake and Abby and I think that my Mum was going through withdrawl. She can't stand not seeing them and makes it pretty obvious when she calls that it's them that she's coming to see.
"I was thinking about coming over on Sunday to see the kids," she says.
"Sure. No problem. We'll be here." Then I ask in a half-jokey kind of way: "But I'm your daughter. Don't you want to see me too?"
"Oh, of course," she says. Yeah right! It's the grandkids all the way.
With my 35th birthday only 5 days away, I had a feeling that my Mum would show up with something for me. She never forgets and she's always very generous. As with previous years, she did not disappoint. She brought me a new shirt and a wad of cash. I'll have to think about what to get with it. How exciting!
But as she was leaving, she gave me a hug and wished me a happy birthday. Then she commented about how she couldn't believe that she had a daughter of 35 and how it made her feel old. And that was when it struck me: I'll be 35 years old. Time flies and I'm nearing 40 a little bit faster than I'd like to. Isn't there some way of slowing this train down!?? I felt a momentary panic and quickly pushed it out of my head.
My motto in life has always been "Don't worry about the things you can't change" and it is definitely apt when it comes to aging. We all do it and the best we can do to slow it is to invest in a good moisturizer.
Closet organization at its best
After putting Abby down for her nap this morning, I went to own bedroom closet to look for my slippers. The seasons are changing and I had cold toes! I have a shoe rack made of wood that I put against the back wall of my side of the closet to try to keep my footwear under control. I don’t own many pairs of shoes, but it’s still amazing how quickly they can make a girl’s closet look like a bomb’s gone off in there.
I hunted for my baby blue slippers behind bagged Christmas gifts, a stack of baseball hats, the whole family’s winter boots and my bead collection. I found one of them fairly quickly but the other one was more elusive.
I really must do something about this chaos, I thought to myself.
So I grabbed the footstool and started from the top. I pulled everything out, threw out old clothes and tried in vain to tame my shoes and the plethora of boots. But there simply wasn’t enough room on my two-tiered shoe rack and no floor space remained to house the rest.
Obviously, I’m not the only woman who struggles with such things because I know there to be a big market out there for closet organization. We don’t have the money (or the space, really) to get one of those built-in, fancy kits, but I would like to have a more logical and organized way of putting my shoes, hats and accessories away. I need them to be easily retrievable, without having to move a million things off of them before I can pull them out. A tall order, maybe, but I see now that someone has created just that.
NeatContainers.com offer stackable containers of varying sizes to accommodate all that closet clutter. The storage containers, also called PODs, are made of transparent plastic so that you can see what’s inside and, best of all, you can stack them vertically and still pull one out, completely, without the tower crumbling. Just like a drawer! Each pair of shoes and each hat could have its own storage container to provide a wonderfully structured and controlled closet.
Check out their how-to video to see what the product looks like and how it works. The pods look sturdy and strong and would certainly make sure that my shoes were no longer inaccessible. And I would have found both my slippers without having to empty my whole closet!
NeatContainers.com accept all the major credit cards, but are somewhat unique in that they also accept PayPal. My hat’s off to them for that!
Ignoring Halloween
It's Halloween today and I've done nothing about it. I usually like the idea of getting the kids dressed up, buying loads of candy and really enjoying the holiday. But this year, I let it go for 3 good reasons:
- we're all getting over colds (Jake is still under the weather)
- every adult in the house was at work tonight other than me and I couldn't handle it all by myself
- we live in the last house on a cul-de-sac, so I wasn't very confident about getting many visitors anyway
So, I'm slightly embarrassed to report that around 6pm, when the trick-or-treat-ing normally starts, I turned off the lights in the kitchen (at the front of the house) and closed the blinds.
I am pleased to report that I didn't have to ignore any knocks on the door because no one came. In fact, when Stephen arrive home from around 6:30pm, he reported that there were loads of kids out on the next block but that our whole block was dark and quiet.
What can I say? We're grumps among grumps.
Madeleine McCann - 6 months on
Earlier today, I received comment number 39 to my blog entry entitled Madeleine McCann. I wrote that post back on May 11th, a few days after the little girl disappeared from her family's holiday apartment in Portugal and I am amazed that it is still drawing attention and comments.
That comment, number 39, lead me to reply with comment 40. I don't apologize for perhaps seeming a bit curt with my reply because I am sick of people suggesting that we should not be discussing newsworthy issues in a public arena such as this unless our opinions are all warm and cushy. I understand if someone has the opinion that the McCanns were right to leave the children sleeping in the apartment while they ate some 100 metres away, but that is not my opinion.
The Daily Mail has release an editorial article entitled Are we trying to kill the McCanns?. It suggests that the McCanns are being unfairly attacked and that we, the attackers, may simply be looking to push the McCanns over the edge to satisfy our need for a dramatic ending. We could be, it says, looking for guilt that just isn't there.
But if the McCanns had started this huge Maddie campaign by saying "we should never have left them alone, but please help us find our daughter", I imagine that a lot of these 'attackers' would feel much more sympathetic toward them. I realize, of course, that their legal team along with their PR specialists have surely advised them to not admit any guilt, I feel that they would have come across in a more positive light if only they'd said what a lot of people where thinking.
I know that I would be seeing them differently now if they would just admit that they were wrong.
Abby can walk!
Big news from Abby!! The little girl is walking. Well, sometimes. She still spends a lot of her time on her hands and knees, and generally only walks when she is encouraged to do so. It started last night with me sitting on the kitchen floor and standing her in front of me. I shimmied my butt backwards as she took each step toward me. That just made her giggle like crazy, but she kept walking!
By the time Stephen got home and took out the camera, Abby was tired and only took about 3 steps. But here they are, in all their glory:
We are also seeing a big urge from Abby to communicate. You'd swear that she was trying to walk and mimic the sounds we make. When we come downstairs and see Jake, she shouts something that sounds like the letter A. Very similar to his name. We say, "Yes, it's Jake" and she grins from ear to ear.
My difficulty with her right now is that she seems to really want to feed herself and is no longer satisfied with mush. The problem is that she still only has 4 teeth and cannot manage harder food. She stares longingly as Jake eats his dinner and I feel bad for her.
Ah well, all in good time.
Day - GFCF
Since writing one of my recent entries about Jake's diet, I've come to realize that soy sauce does indeed contain gluten unless specified as gluten-free. So I messed up in giving it to him but I'm convinced that this diet is going to take some getting used to. It's a pretty steep learning curve for us when all we've ever worried about before is staying away from foods with transfat!
I've cooked him some meals that have now been frozen so that a good, healthy, GFCF dinner is ready for him at any time. Stephen picked up some dairy-free margarine. Jake seems pretty pleased to be back on buttered toasted bagels again. He likes jam, but I think he prefers margarine.
We saw Jake's Speech Language Pathologist, J, yesterday. Stephen and I discussed ahead of time that I wouldn't tell her about the diet and first see if she noticed any changes in Jake. This would help alleviates our fear that we were making it all up.
Firstly, I should point out that Jake does a specific 'stimming' behaviour: he stomps his feet and runs around for a few seconds. He tends to do that every once in a while. He gets it out of his system and then goes back to what he was doing. This is very common among children with autism. They often have repetitive actions that stimulate them in a way that feels good to them. For Jake, it seems to be deep pressure in his hips, knees or ankles.
Anyway, forty minutes into our hour session, Jake finally got up and did his little stomping routine. J commented that it was odd that he’d gone so long without doing it. Then I showed J Jake’s new trick. I put my hand to my mouth, opened my mouth into an ‘O’ shape and started humming. I tapped my mouth over and over, making an echo-y sound. Jake looked up at me (making great eye contact), lifted his hand to his mouth and, get this, he copied me!
This is a brand new trick and it gives me goose bumps every time he does it now.
J looked shocked. She squealed with delight and insisted on high-five-ing me.
And then I told her about the diet. I told her the changes we’d noticed and how we were so surprised. J begged me to document everything. What he eats, what he can do and can’t do, what he’s learned.
So this blog isn’t just for fun anymore. I need to keep a detailed diary of Jake’s dietary progress.
Here’s the new trick in action:
