Celebrating Ellie with a Little Trip to See Taylor Swift!

Once  upon a time...about 18-years-ago... a sweet little baby was born!   She was happy, easy-going, and delighted her parents and four older siblings from day one.   

She's had a bit of a rough road in life, starting with seizures that started when she was in kindergarten (and continue today), having a million side effects to most of the anti-seizure medications we tried, being in first grade when our world was turned upside down with Spencer,  experiencing some social isolation from the girls at church through elementary school, and then moving 4 times while she was in high school (a lot of it during COVID).    This girl has definitely been through the wringer a bit....

BUT, I have to say, she is also a girl that has  not just weathered any storm she's faced, but in the midst of them, she's learned a kindness, empathy, resiliency, and depth well beyond her years. 

We are proud of her and will miss her when she heads off to BYU-Idaho this fall!  

So, how did we celebrate 18-years of Ellie making our lives a little brighter?   

We drove to Las Vegas and took her to her very first concert!  

We planned to take off the morning after her birthday, but woke up to 6ish inches of new snow.  {Yes, it's the end of March and still snowing every other day.} 

The snow delayed us a few hours, but eventually we got out...barely beating the snow squall warning that popped up on our phones basically right as we were leaving.   The trip to Las Vegas was pretty long with slow moving traffic due to the snow at first, traffic outside of Saint George, then annoying construction that took forever on the stretch between Saint George and Vegas.  Worst of all was the  terrible traffic and parking within Las Vegas.  We were really glad we were arriving a day early, because we would have been quite late if we were catching the Friday night show.  

We spent the rest of the evening finding food, finding our way to the stadium from our hotel, and picking up our Taylor Swift merch that a friend had stood in line for hours to buy for us.  

The next day, we donned our Taylor Swift merch and set out to explore the Strip...something we'd never done before!    It was fun to see the "Walmart versions" of so many cool places and we enjoyed the conversation starter that our t-shirts were all day.  We had a lot of entertaining conversations with people who would normally never talk to us, but were drawn to ask about the concert. 

We knew that Las Vegas is referred to as Sin City, but we were a little shocked by the indoor smoking, the number of bare butts we saw, the in-your-face signs for prostitutes, and overall debauchery that was on full display there on a busy Saturday morning.   Ultimately we decided that Las Vegas must have been what Lehi saw in his vision when he referred to the "great and spacious buildings".  

On the bright side, we found some GREAT food!   This ice cream store called Cereal Killerz was once featured on Shark Tank and was a fun, original concept and quite tasty!  We would definitely go back again sometime and I just noticed they have a SLC location, so maybe sooner, rather than later.    

Thankfully I had a lactose pill with me, so I didn't spend the rest of the day running to the bathroom...

This sign made us laugh...

We also took a ride on the High Roller Ferris Wheel , which is currently the 2nd highest Ferris wheel in the world.   

We totally enjoyed the birds' eye view of the city and the surrounding area.

Dinner was at a French restaurant called, Mon Ami Gabi, which was pretty much out of this world.  The waiter claimed that Taylor Swift had eaten there in a private room earlier in the day and ordered the trout with a side of brussels sprouts.   We weren't quite sure if we believed him, but after tasting the food, we were at least convinced that it was good enough that Taylor COULD have eaten there and been happy!  {Note to any Virginia friends that might be reading this...I just noticed that there's also a location in Reston.   I highly recommend going there for a date night sometime.}

The service was excellent, the food delicious for all of us, and the  salmon I ordered was among the best salmon I've ever had. 

After dinner we headed back to the hotel to put on our sparkles and bling for the concert!   I was wearing more make-up than I had since about 1988 and I thought my sequined sweater was quite fun, but we were definitely VERY conservative in our dress compared to many of the concert-goers!   

Ellie and Emma had chosen different Taylor Swift Eras for all of our outfits...

but don't ask me what they were.   I just thought it was fun to be there and feel like a teenager again for a few hours. 

The concert was a  super fun 3-1/2 hours of going through Taylor's different Eras...

I knew a lot of her songs (thanks to the 5 teens that have lived in my house over the years), but I found that I liked most of them....even the ones I didn't know.   

I was worried about feeling overwhelmed by the loud music and crowds...

but all in all, we all had a great time....

singing and dancing along...

 

And I think our birthday girl had the most fun of all!   She did a lot of shrieking along with her singing and it was fun to see her so animated! 

 

 We didn't get back to our hotel until almost midnight, so we crashed hard that night, then woke up the next day to head home.  We took a quick stop at the temple on the way out, but the grounds were closed, so this shot out the car window was as close as we got!

The trip home was filled with construction, bad traffic, and spots with treacherous weather...so it took us a few hours longer to get home than it should have, but we made it.  

It was a fun weekend together celebrating our Ellie girl and I'd have to say we all (Glen and I included) like Taylor Swift more than we did before.    Thanks for giving us a reason to celebrate, Ellie!  

WE LOVE YOU, ELLIE!   HAPPY BIRTHDAY!!!  

Food, Glorious {Keto} Food

I've read about low carb/high fat diets (keto) as a treatment for children with seizures for many years, but frankly never considered it an option for Ellie.   It seemed way too hard to do and I worried that it wasn't all that healthy either.

Then our friends, the Spigarellis, started doing it to help with blood sugar control for their daughter's Type 1 diabetes.   I watched them closely and asked Rachel a gazillion questions as they figured out what worked for them, and then  eventually as they  ended up shifting their whole family to that way of eating.   Suddenly it seemed like something we could try...someday.

Then we had a weird glitch with Glen's COBRA insurance and ended up completely uninsured for several months.  We ended up joining a Christian Healthshare so we didn't have to pay a penalty, but basically it was just major medical and didn't cover anything.  We learned firsthand very quickly how expensive Ellie's medication is without insurance ($300+ per month) and we did not like paying that outrageous amount.  So we decided it was time to try low carb/high fat for ourselves!

That was August.

We muddled our way through a lot of mediocre food and some crazy cravings at first, but we ended up totally changing our tune before long.  The food is very satisfying and combined with lots and lots of veggies, is actually very healthy.  Glen's lost a bunch of weight, Ellie and I have maintained ours, and our cholesterol (and other blood numbers) have never looked better.

And it's helped Ellie's seizures so much that we've been able to do reduce her medication to less than half of what she had been taking!

  So after six months of eating this way, I am calling it a success and the plan is to keep going with it until Ellie's seizures go away completely, or it completely stops being effective for them.   And even then I will probably always eat a lower carb diet, because I frankly feel much better eating this way.

So what do we eat on this diet?

Here's a glimpse:  

This was a our lemon-herbed chicken served over cauliflower rice for dinner and over a salad for lunch the next day.    It encapsulates everything that eating Keto is for us....healthy, full of veggies, delicious, and pretty quick and easy to make.  

Friday has always been pizza night at our house and we weren't about to let a low-carb diet get in the way of that!   This "fat-head" pizza crust is easy to make (NO cauliflower at all), and is good enough to serve to friends who never even notice a difference! 

My creamy Mexican chowder (without the beans and corn), along with sautéed cabbage, and a keto roll.  

Spaghetti with zucchini noodles and low carb marinara sauce (from Trader Joes), along with some keto bread with melted cheese. 

Sweet and sour chicken, sautéed cabbage, with roasted broccoli. 

Grilled salmon with salsa, roasted brussels sprouts, and seasoned avocado. 

Pesto chicken over zucchini noodles with stuffed peppers.

Jalapeno Popper Casserole with mashed cauliflower and roasted broccoli and butternut squash.  (Butternut squash is a little higher in carb than we normally do, but it's so healthy we have it occasionally)

Sheet pan fajitas (one of our very favorites) on zucchini tortillas with homemade guacamole. 

Chicken cordon bleu casserole with cauliflower rice and roasted broccoli. 

Keto Lasagna (this is another one to serve to other people...it's so good you can't tell the difference). We went through two whole pans of this in three days!  

Faux Baked "Potato" Soup with Keto Breadsticks (made with this dough)

Oven roasted chicken and broccoli with homemade Alfredo sauce drizzled over the top. 

Oven cooked chicken legs with herb-roasted veggies (brussels sprouts, onions, and mushrooms seasoned with fresh rosemary and sage).

And what do we eat for breakfast?   

Well, most people on keto eat a lot of eggs for breakfast.  We do go through a lot of eggs now, but I really really love breakfast, so we have a rotation of some fun breakfasts that we have every week.   It's literally one of my favorite parts about eating keto.   Before eating this way, I'd always be hungry by 11am or so.  Now I'm filled until 1:00pm most days.   

This is probably my favorite....hemp seed porridge.  It's like a keto version of oatmeal and we top it with stevia sweetened whipping cream, unsweetened coconut, raspberries, and unsweetened cacao nibs.  It feels incredibly indulgent and fills me up for hours!  

It took trying a lot of keto pancake/waffle recipes before we finally found one we like (we don't add the butter to this recipe).   We serve it with unsweetened greek yogurt (5% Fage is the brand with the lowest carbs), homemade stevia/erythritol syrup, and some fresh raspberries.  Again, it's delicious and filling!   

Stay tuned and I'll share a list of my favorite Keto resources soon!   In the meantime, feel free to shoot me a question if you're interested in learning more about this way of eating.

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Our Journey in Homeschooling

Our homeschooling journey started when I felt very strongly that I needed to homeschool Spencer for 8th grade.   We did it just that year and then he went off to high school the next year, refreshed and ready to work hard.  I didn't necessarily have the same strong impression to do it for Cami as I had for Spence, but she really, really wanted to do it and over the course of that year, we decided that 8th grade was a perfect year to pull all the kids out.  Thus our homeschooling for just 8th grade tradition officially began.   It's been a beautiful way to reconnect with each child before they head off to high school and I like that the only thing on the high school transcript that we have to worry about that year is math, and other than that they can each have some freedom to explore and learn about things that interest them.   

When Ellie started having seizures when she was in kindergarten, I wondered many times if I should just pull her out and homeschool her.  She was so tired from the medications and the seizures were so frequent that they interrupted her learning time at school.   I was frankly rather surprised when I prayed about it that it wasn't the right thing.    The reason for that answer became very clear the next school year, though,  when Spence was diagnosed with leukemia and our lives were 100% turned upside down.   I've often been grateful for the loving and steady support we had from the kids' elementary school during that crazy time and, in hindsight, I can see that having them in school was absolutely the best place for them to be at that time.   

Sometime during Ellie's 2nd grade year, though, I had the impression that I needed to consider homeschooling again.   Her medication side effects were less than they had been, but her seizures were as frequent as ever and they were starting to affect her socially too.   We met at length with the school staff that year to find solutions, but ultimately we realized that there was no amount of "special education" she could receive in a school environment that would ever suit the needs of our intelligent, well-behaved child who had frequent, but quiet seizures.  Basically, because of her intelligence,  she'd find strategies to fill the gaps in instruction that she'd missed during her seizures, but still it wasn't enough to keep her from struggling.   But because she didn't struggle enough to make her work fall below grade level expectations, she didn't qualify for anything in the way of special education. 

Everyone at the school was actually great to work with and tried very hard to be accommodating, but  because a school is a school with hundreds of students and our one student had a rather unusual set of circumstances that caused her to struggle, they couldn't offer what she needed.   It was quickly becoming clear that Ellie was being set up to fall through the cracks of the educational system.  What she needed was  someone who could tailor her education to her individually, who could pause when she had a seizure, and help when she needed extra help.    She needed mom to be her teacher.  

We prayed and this time felt very strongly that we needed to pull out both Ellie and Adam.   Adam was a kid who was doing great at school and that answer frankly surprised us a bit, but looking back I can see that it was absolutely the best thing we could have done.    Homeschooling them  has changed the daily dynamics of our family in a big way, but it has been a blessing far beyond what we ever could have imagined.  

When I started homeschooling, we just approached it as a take-it-one-year-at-a-time mentality.  After four years though,  I think we're in it for the long haul.  It's changed us all for the better and the fact that Ellie still has seizures is only one tiny factor in our reasons to continue to homeschool. 

It's definitely been a windy journey to figure out the type of homeschooling that works for us, but after four years, we're getting there.    We've got a great network of homeschooling friends around us, the kids are working hard (without having meltdowns), and the rigor for all the subjects seems just right.  And I feel like we're finally really starting to reap the benefits that homeschooling offers--benefits like having the freedom to be able to travel and  the kids actually loving to learn (and not just checking boxes to get a grade).   

It really is a beautiful thing!  

What better way to study culture and architecture than to walk the streets of Venice and visit Basilica San Marco in person?

One of the best parts about living near DC is the opportunity for really cool field trips.
This was Adam at a class on the Constitution at the National Archives. They dove into documents,
learned about the different parts of the Constitution and what they mean in today's world, and
then went to see the actual Constitution.  How cool is that?   

Here is Ellie at the same class at the National Archives.

We also recently attended a class all about birds of prey.  

We have a co-op for Biology this year and it's been the perfect blend of academic rigor and hands-on experimentation. 

We extracted DNA from peas and examined it under a microscope.

We've also examined cell structures under a microscope (Adam was very proud of this picture)

We also have a AP US Government co-op class where they dive into the history and workings of the US Government.
I don't have many pictures of it, but this day Adam, his friend, Abby, and his class went downtown to a
National Lawyer's Convention where they got to hear national politicians (Ted Cruz, Nikki Haley, etc) sit on panels and discuss controversial topics that America  is facing right now. Again, how cool is that?!