The Chou Life

Last Thursday brought the biggest snowstorm we’ve seen since we moved to Divide.  We ended up with around 14-ish inches by Friday afternoon.  I enjoyed watching the snow fall all day while drinking hot tea and keeping a constant fire in the wood stove.  I was a little concerned about Eric driving home in the inclement weather but he made it safely, thank you Lord! 

The next day (Friday) we took a mini road trip up to Breckenridge.  It was a GORGEOUS 2 1/2 hour drive and we enjoyed every minute of it.  We stopped in Fairplay at Java Moose for a bite to eat…

Breckenridge was brimming with tourists and skiers but we still enjoyed walking the downtown area.  Even with below freezing temps the weather was very pleasant while the sun was shining, but as soon as the clouds came we started to freeze and made a beeline for our car.  We bought Hudson a beanie on our way back to the parking spot.  It’s an adult size so he can wear it for the next 70+ years…how’s that for saving money?  We happened to pass Abby Hall and I insisted we stop for a picture even though we could barely feel our faces.

After dinner at the Pizza Parlor (the first splurge on our grain-free diet!) where Greta (the girl next booth) and Calla became best buds (she’s the social butterfly of our family), we headed to Frisco to spend the night.  Ah, king size bed, endless TV watching, in-room coffee, endless TV watching, worn out kiddos falling quickly asleep, endless TV watching…!   Saturday morning, we made a quick pit stop at Abbey’s Coffee and Stork and Bear Company on Main Street in Frisco, then headed back home.  In the span of about 28 hours, we were reminded over and over again why we love Colorado!

-Abby

Hudson is now 3 1/2 months old.  Time is flying by, as usual!  My mom and her friend Roylene put together a baby shower with a tea party theme this last weekend.  I think I like the idea of having baby showers AFTER the baby is born…it makes opening gifts a lot easier without a huge belly in the way!  Mom and Roylene did a fabulous job with the food and decorations and made me feel very special.  We had a full tea with savories, breads, and sweets, each complemented with a different type of tea.  My personal fave tea was the tangerine spice: a clove-studded tangerine slice was placed into each teacup along with a sugar cube and a black tea bag, then boiling water was added to the cup.  Delicious!  I do have to admit that I strayed from my grain-free diet to enjoy the beautifully prepared food!  The sweet guests blessed Hudson and me with some very generous and CUTE gifts.  I also received several teacups and saucers to start the collection I’ve always wanted

The food:

The flowers (by the talented Roylene):

The fun:

-Abby

Another weekend down and as always the cycle continues with yet another Monday.  I’m coming down with a severe case of “the Mondays.”  I can feel it in creeping upon me as my 6:00 A.M. wake-up call draws ever closer with unprejudiced haste and complete disregard for my unrest.  My only solace is a hope that I may fatally strike a deer during my commute and immerse myself in much poundage of venison.

My grain-free diet continues and I remain quite victorious.  We had a family dinner fellowship (FDF) meal this weekend and Abby was charged with bringing the bread!  Gosh! So she made bacon swiss bread. Double Gosh!! She made it out of sourdough bread instead of regular french so apparently it was easier to digest in the “no-grains” aspect.  I had one slice instead of my usual um….6-8.  What is bacon bread? Bacon bread is a loaf of french bread that is sliced in 1 inch segments down to the bottom crust but not all the way through.  Then, in between each slice, you place: some butter, a slice of swiss cheese, and green onions.  To top it off, lay a strip of raw bacon upon each segment and then bake at 400 for 15-20 minutes! Sooooo delicious.  Ok, so I had 1 slice at FDF but that was it!  Tomorrow marks the beginning of my fourth week of eating grain free and it has not been too bad so far.  The first few days were rough, but I’m getting better at not craving grainy food items.

So today we went hiking again at Palmer Park (PP).  PP is a park in the middle of Colorado Springs that is basically a gimonstrous wilderness.  We hiked there a few weeks ago and had a good time so we decided to try the same area again.  I had Calla in a pack and Abby carried Hudson in a front pack.  I definitely feel acclimated to our new altitude, but doing anything aerobic is just an absolute killer.  Calla weighs about 30 lbs. and Hudson…at 3 months is a whopping 15 lbs.-ish.  We were able to keep up with Garry and Vicki but they gave us a couple grace breaks.  I think my deep lower left lung wheezes were a pretty good signal of the much needed aformentioned moments to hold on to life.  Lyrics to a Dashboard Confessional song kept running through my mind: “Oh sweet lungs don’t fail me now. Just one more breath, I beg you please.”  We hiked for about 1.5 hours.  We passed this couple and they were asking us how we felt.  Garry was ahead of me and he replies, “We’re feeling pretty good.”  I follow up by saying, “I’m not feeling so good.”  She says, “Well, look at all that extra weight you’re carrying.”  I smile and reply, ” Yeah, plus I have her on my back!”  She smiled and I continued walking and focused on drawing breath.  Keuma came along and did really well.  He would run to the front of our little caravan and then run to the back….me…and make sure I was coming, then head back to the front.  He basically repeated this cycle the whole time.  It was encouraging that my dog cared enough to check on me…but kinda stunk that he had to check on me.

-Eric

Calla’s new favorite thing to do is conduct photo shoots of her and Hudson.  I’m behind the camera of course, but she is most definitely the shoot manager.  So this morning we took a few minutes to snap some photos of the kiddos in their pajamas.  In the first pic, she is very concerned about the teeny bit of drool on Hudson’s lip.  Besides being photo shoot manager, she also works full time as a drool reporter!

-Abby

I’m convinced that Hudson has some very Ware-like characteristics but not everyone agrees with me.  Can you see the resemblance between this little boy and his Grandpa Ware?

-Abby

Our little girl has started gymnastics.  There is a gym pretty close to us that offers classes for the younger kids.  This past Monday was Calla’s third time and she did really well.  She is not only the youngest there, but all the other kids have been going for much longer than she has.  Most of the other kids are boys and either 3 or 4 years old.   Although she is the youngest, she is one of the tallest…except for the 3 1/2 year old boy.  Calla will be three this June.

We have been practicing some of her gymnastics at home to help her progress with the other kids.  She does well but gets super excited and then just runs through everything.  She is by far the wildest kid there; her eagerness is so fun to watch but can be frustrating when all you want her to do is walk the balance beam with her arms out and watch where she’s going…but NOOOO she has to run and bounce!

I snapped some photos from this last Monday night.  Most of them came out blurry because it was a small area and I didn’t really want to send any parents/children into epileptic seizures with my flash, so I took most of them with super high ISO and as fast of a shutter speed as it could manage.  So here are some pics from Calla’s “my-nastics” as she says.

-Eric

Abby and I have decided to go “grain-free” for at least one more week.  We are starting to get better at planning meals and learning to avoid the things we desire and fight the cravings.  For me, it’s not even that I crave carbs/grains; rather, I miss being full and being able to just put anything I wanted in my face.  Until this little diet, I really had no idea that I was consuming so many high carb/grain food items.  Our house is stocked full of “no no” items.  I have allowed myself to have sodas but only diet…except for the occasional Orangina…the one, the only…oh sweet Orangina!  Why must you be soo delicious and pulpy?

So we have been eating lots of meat and salads, cheese, fruits and nuts.  This isn’t a very cheap way to live.  Especially when you buy dry roasted nuts and organic fruits, meat and veggies.  We are not going totally organic but we get what we can.  I’ve been munching lots of baby carrots during work.  Kind of my Jalapeno Cheddar Cheetos replacement.  Apparently JCC’s are gluten free, but we are not eating corn either which my sources tell me is technically a grain but with veggie properties.

I am not usually the one who cooks meals in our home, but sometimes oooohhh but sometimes…the beast must be released.  Cooking for me is more an act of desperation and fight for survival and if not I cook mostly to enjoy knowing that others are enjoying my creations.  So, my culinary endeavors as of late have not been for the satisfaction of others; oh no, I am a man on a mission.  I feel kinda like Isaac Mendez of Heroes when I cook.  I get in a mode where I don’t really know where I’m going or what I’m doing but I am doing it and doing it and doing it well.  If I may use another analogy…it’s kinda like a shotgun.  It ain’t pretty but it gets the job done.  When the dust settles, the kitchen is a total loss but the aftermath is usually quite palatable.

So tonight, I whipped up some salmon that we picked up at Trader Joe’s a few weeks back, some Purple Haze (a chevre), imitation crab meat, roasted red peppers, butter, lemons and misc spices.  Threw it in the oven at some temp for some time and voila! Seafood Blitzkrieg Surprise. It was pretty tasty.  The chevre is almost a little strong but the salmon does a good job balancing the flavors.  I’m also not sure about this, but it’s probably a gimonstrous culinary faux pas to mix salmon and imitation crab meat with essence of goat in cheese form.  Who cares! Rules were made to be broken.  Dang it feels good to be a gangster.

-Eric

On Friday after I got off work early, we headed out to run some errands of both the business and pleasure variety.  I went to the military surplus store and Abby went to Envi, a boutique in Old Colorado City that “specializes in the unusual and unique.”  I stayed outside with the chillins since the storefront made for such a fun photo op.  The owner came out and gave Calla some butcher paper and a bucket of crayons to draw on and we just snapped some photos while Abby browsed.  Here are some of our favs from the shoot.  Enjoy!

-Eric

As I’ve been roaming the Internet and flipping through my nutrition books for info on carbohydrate withdrawal, I’ve come across some interesting findings from members of the nutritional pharmacology world.  I was aware of some of the symptoms and effects of food allergies and intolerances, but apparently there is more to the story than I once thought.

Food sensitivities may cause allergic people to crave the foods to which they are allergic. Just as a drug addict suffers symptoms of withdrawal when the drug is taken away, allergic people will likely experience some form of discomfort when they stop consuming the offending food.

Dr. Michael Rosenbaum, M.D., a nutritional medicine practitioner in California, believes that sensitivity to foods usually affects the limbic part of the brain. This portion of the brain contains the control centers of our emotions  and memory, as well as involuntary functions like body temperature, sleep, hunger, and thirst. Food allergies seem to affect most of these vital functions.

This view is shared by William Philpott, M.D., a clinical ecologist from Oklahoma City, who has studied this topic extensively.  Dr. Philpott believes that a person’s frequent contact with allergenic foods triggers an increase in the brain opioid enkephalin. Enkephalin is a narcotic produced by the body that is just as addictive as external narcotics!  Basically, food addictions aren’t always just mental…there is a physiological explanation for the addiction.

The primary food allergen culprits are coffee, dairy products, wheat (gluten), eggs and corn.  Marshall Mandell, M.D., author of Dr. Mandell’s 5 Day Allergy Relief System, found that 92.2% of hospitalized schizophrenic patients were allergic to one or more  of these common substances. When Dr. Mandell tested a group of patients diagnosed as “hard-to-treat neurotics”, he found that 88% of them were allergic to wheat,  60% to milk and 50% to corn.  Those statistics seem very convincing to me.

Water retention is also very common among people who have food allergies and is a significant contributing factor to obesity.  Removing the offending food will often result in a water loss of five to ten pounds in just one week’s time.  Dr. Rosenbaum has frequently observed these water retention symptoms in his allergy clinic patients. He found that after the initial water loss, the person tends to lose fat more easily.  Often, Rosenbaum believes, the substantial weight loss that occurs when someone follows a low-allergen diet has little to do with the number of calories in the diet, and more to do with the types of food being consumed.

Because gluten allergies seem to be fairly common and due to my somewhat chronic GI issues, I’ve often wondered if I have a sensitivity to wheat. I haven’t experienced any withdrawal-type emotional symptoms since going grain-free, but I have lost a couple of pounds in just four days.  It is most likely water loss since my caloric intake hasn’t changed much.   In all my six years of education in nutrition, I don’t think I was ever taught the neurophysiological effects of food allergies.  I plan to keep self-educating on this topic!

-Abby

Yum!

But it’s now day THREE and we haven’t succumbed to the temptation to cheat yet. We’re actually thinking about going for two weeks…

-Abby