Our middle child Georgia, almost age two, has certainly given us a run for our money. Of my three, she was born the quickest, rushing into the world after three easy pushes, a mere 32 minutes after I walked into the hospital. To me, it seems like she’s been rushing around ever since. She started walking at 10 months and started running and climbing right after that. Yes, it seems that the only time Georgia is not in motion is when she is sleeping.

With the birth of her baby sister, Raquel, it has seemed to us that Georgia has intensified. We’ve always known her to be a spirited child, but in addition to adjusting to life not being the baby of the family anymore, she’s at the age of the so-called “terrible two’s”. Now, I must say that I am not a fan of calling what children go through developmentally during their second year of life as “terrible”, but I could see why people use that term.  I must also say that because of our newly expanded family and how stressful life has seemed lately, we are cracking down. We are taking a look at where perhaps some of our own behaviors as parents, and even lack of consistent discipline tactics, may be contributing to recent issues with both of our older kids.  We’ve been doing a lot of observation. If our walls could talk they would tell you that a lot of the time, Brent and I take turns in panicked voices asking, “What do we do? what do we do?”.

Georgia has had a few outbursts of hitting or pushing at school. Those incidents have become fewer and farther between, thankfully, but what was being noticed by her teacher, was how difficult it can be for Georgia to settle into an activity during work time. She gets bored with tasks that she cannot complete, and then is either disruptive or rambunctious. Recently, her teacher approached us with the idea that perhaps Georgia had something going on with her diet, possibly a gluten intolerance that was lending to her behavior.  She kept insisting that maybe gluten was the culprit. So being the responsible parents we are, we set out to eliminate gluten from our household.

In order to eliminate gluten from your home, one must actually know what gluten is first. I feel a little stupid admitting that I didn’t know exactly what people were talking about when they said gluten-free. I wondered, “What the heck is gluten, anyway?” So I turned to my trusty online tool, Google, to help me figure it all out.

I learned that Gluten is a protein found in wheat, rye and barley. It is also found in grains that are closely related to wheat like, spelt, kamut, and triticale. I learned that many people living gluten-free even stay away from oats because of cross contamination with wheat during processing.  So I figured that bread was out, but it is really hard to tell a two-year old that they can’t have their fishy crackers because they contain gluten. But we managed to find another gluten-free snack. It turns out that gluten is in almost everything we had in our cupboard.

My family doesn’t eat a lot of gluten really, so we were skeptical on her teacher’s suspicions but we figured if we eliminated gluten and it worked, how wonderful that would be to nip any behavioral issues immediately in the bud with simple dietary changes. My on-line research has illuminated some additional things about gluten I didn’t know. It turns out that many kids who have been diagnosed with ADHD were actually suffering from undiagnosed problems with gluten-intolerance or Celiac’s disease. Ah-ha! So that’s why our teacher had us explore eliminating gluten.

I feel like I have so much to learn about gluten intolerance. Just recently, I’ve been put in touch with some tremendous moms in our community that have been working to provide their children with gluten-free diets in conjunction with getting treatment for sensory processing disorders. It may very well be that we have a child that is not only on the cusp of turning two, but who might also have an issue with sensory integration disorder.

So far, we’ve been doing pretty well over here by switching to rice pastas, gluten-free cereals, and gluten-free snacks. I found that many gluten-free items are available at our local Trader Joe’s and Whole Foods. I have also been turned onto a few great websites for gluten-free recipes or gluten-free information for sufferers of Celiac’s disease, www.northbayceliacs.org, and www.gfreecuisine.com. Gluten-free bulk food can be ordered from sites like www.unfi.com. Additionally, there are local eateries, which have gluten-free options such as the New Yorker Pizza & Restaurant downtown who make, what I’m told is a delicious, gluten-free pizza. For those gluten-free treats, Sift Cupcakery in Cotati, sells gluten-free cupcakes on Wednesdays for $3.75 in vanilla, chocolate, and red velvet (my girls didn’t know the difference).

The jury is still out on Georgia; we are getting her evaluated by a professional before we rule anything out (stay tuned for this topic in a later blog). Truth be told, we haven’t seen too much of a change in Georgia since gluten proofing our home. But, we will press on though because I’m learning that in this family we need to be more consistent as well as persistent as it seems to take awhile for change to take hold. In the meantime, I’m going to pray the mini-trampoline we are ordering helps us all get our jiggles out.