Adventures in Pancake Making

I never used to make my own pancakes from scratch. A couple months ago we ran out of the Trader Joe's multigrain pancake mix that I usually buy so I told my kids that sadly, we could not have pancakes. Then I thought to myself, why can't I make it? I love to bake, I'm pretty good at it, so how come it never occurred to me that I could make pancakes from scratch? I googled a recipe and was pretty happy with the result.

Today I made pancakes again, but I wanted to make it healthier since I've been really watching what I eat. I just completed the 21 Day Fix and it has inspired me to change the eating habits of not just myself, but my whole family. So I looked up the same recipe and I made some alterations. For a gluten free version of the same pancake, simply use all oatmeal flour instead of half oatmeal and half whole wheat. I'm going to try it that way next time! I made the oatmeal flour myself by blending instant oatmeal in my Vitamix. Milk can also be subbed for water, almond milk, coconut milk, etc.

Sari's Pancakes

2 eggs
3/4 cup milk
3/4 cup water
4 tbsp white vinegar
1 tbsp vanilla
1 tbsp ground flax seed
1 cup oatmeal flour
1 cup whole wheat flour
4 tbsp sugar (you can sub with honey, agave, maple syrup, stevia, etc.)
2 tsp baking powder
1 tsp baking soda
1 tsp salt
1 tbsp coconut oil

I started with the eggs and whisked them together, adding in the liquid ingredients first and ending with the flour last. Kids loved them and my husband said they tasted great!

Are you using Ebates?

Heard of Ebates? It's pretty simple, you go to their website before you make an online purchase and you get money back! Search to see if their store is listed (usually it is) and click through the Ebates website to get to that online store and then make your purchase. For example, right now you'd get 7% back at Old Navy, 2% back at Gap and 5% back at the Children's Place. It changes all the time.

When I first signed up I got a $10 gift card from Target right away (just for signing up, it was completely unexpected) and a $3 check a few weeks later. Since then I've gotten a $5 check and I just got an email telling me that a $7 check is on the way. It's not a lot, but every bit counts! Plus I don't always remember to click through Ebates when I buy things so I need to work on it.

It's legit, I haven't received any more spam than usual since signing up and I think it's worth it. Click here to sign up! I get a referral bonus ($5 I think) and you will get your own referral code when you sign up and tell all your friends. The incentives are always changing :)

Save 40% on gDiapers!

This is very exciting news, the gDiapers contest from 4 years ago is BACK with another awesome deal. I'm really excited because:
1) if you read this blog you know I'm a big fan
2) it's a great discount,
3) I almost won last time (read the article here) and I'm hoping to WIN this time because...

If I win, I'm giving the $1,000 grand prize to Angelina's Army. Angelina is the 4 year old daughter of a good friend of mine and she is currently fighting cancer. She has stage 4 neuroblastoma. Angelina is a smart, beautiful, kind little girl and you can read about her story here and visit her facebook page here.

SO, if you are looking for a more eco-friendly alternative to disposable diapers then you really should try gDiapers. At this price, it's a no brainer. Use my code: new2630Erdos and click here. This code will take 40% off the New Friend Bundle, which includes 3 gPants and 2 packages or disposable inserts. 

It's been quite a year!

Since I last posted, a year ago, both of my daughters developed serious food allergies. During Thanksgiving dinner, 2012, my older daughter, then 5 years old, had an anaphylactic reaction to a Nutella dessert. Here is the recipe, by the way, it's delicious for those who aren't allergic to it. She said, "My neck hurts" and started coughing. I looked at her face and it was turning red. Within a few minutes she threw up. We did not realize that these were the signs of anaphylaxis. I gave her Benadryl and she was OK. We took turns watching her sleep that night. I was stupid. I should have called 911. I will regret not doing that for the rest of my life, but we are lucky, she is alive. We had her tested with an allergist and were told that we needed to carry 2 Epi Pens at all times. She has a potentially deadly allergy to hazelnuts (subsequent reactions will be worse than her initial reaction) and unknown/borderline reactions to cashews and walnuts. She had eaten cashews without incidence prior to her hazelnut reaction, but the allergist said no more. Allergies can pop up overnight and it's too risky. She's never had a walnuts and I don't intend to ever find out if she reacts to them or not. She is not allergic to peanuts and almonds. She also reacted to fish (developed a rash on her face after eating tilapia) but we have not yet run a fish panel allergy test on her. We're just avoiding fish for now.

This is a picture of her allergy test. Unfortunately I took this only a couple minutes after they pricked her back so you can't see where the walnuts and cashews reacted. Her hazelnut also got worse than this picture shows, but you get the basic idea. The other two spots (top left and bottom right) are histamine controls.

My other daughter, who is now 15 months old, had something called FPIES (Food Protein-Induced Enterocolitis Syndrome). I say "had" because she has since grown out of it (thank goodness). She had severe FPIES reactions to rice and oats. She would throw up for about 8 hours until her stomach was empty and then she would throw up yellow liquid (bile). Then she would have diarrhea for weeks. The first time we thought it was a bad virus (as did the pediatrician), the second time I was suspicious of the oatmeal, and by the third time it was obvious that it was a serious food allergy. It was so bad the allergist told me to stop feeding her solid food until her gut healed and then I could try veggies one at a time. She was 8 months old when we got her diagnosis. You can read more about FPIES here. FPIES is diagnosed by ruling other things out because it is a GI food allergy, not an IgE allergy. The reactions that show up on skin prick tests, like my older daughter's above, are IgE allergies. Non-IgE allergies, like FPIES, will not show up on these tests.

After about a month I tried sweet potatoes. She didn't have an FPIES reaction, but she had an intense gag reflex to even the tiniest amounts of puree on a spoon, or even a smidge on the tip of my finger. Here is a video that I took of her during this time. What you can't see in the video is that I only gave her a tiny bit off that spoon. It looks like I put it all in her mouth, but it was really just a smidge. Most of the puree on that spoon stayed on the spoon. If you pause it at 15 seconds you can kind of see that the spoon is still full when I pull it back:



After the sweet potato incident I tried various fruits - apple sauce, licking a melon, etc. and although she didn't throw up, she did have almost instant diarrhea that would be severe for about 6 hours (2-3 diaper changes an hour) and then less severe for a couple weeks. This would leave her poor tushie red and we couldn't use cloth diapers during this time because I had to put cream on her constantly and it was just too messy. I stopped trying to feed her solids and continued to breast feed her. Luckily she did not react to anything in my breast milk.

At about 10 months she started acting interested when I would give my 6 year old twins yogurt tubes. I let her lick a tiny bit and she did not throw up. I gradually let her have more and more until she ate about half a yogurt tube without throwing up. I started buying her whole milk yogurt and by 12 months she was eating one single serving yogurt tub a day. It was her only meal. At around 13 months I re-introduced her to oats by grounding up a plain cheerio and hiding it in her yogurt. Her FPIES was completely gone! Unfortunately, her gag reflex was not. She threw up everything that wasn't yogurt. I even froze little bits of yogurt to make homemade yogurt bites and she threw up the second it hit her tongue.

In September, at 13 months, I took her to a feeding and swallowing center where she had a complete evaluation. They observed her eating yogurt, was seen by a speech therapist and an occupational therapist, and was basically told that she was extremely delayed in feeding and swallowing, but perfectly fine in other areas. This is taking into account that she was born 8 weeks premature. They suggested putting her on Zantac to treat a "possible underlying GI issue" and that rubbed me the wrong way. Why do I want to medicate my baby for something she "possibly" has? Also, she used to have very severe reflux (which is a whole other blogpost entirely) and was previously on Zantac, but taken off of it when it was no longer doing anything for her. Her reflux disappeared at around 9 months. The doctor at the feeding clinic told me that I couldn't skip purees and that I should start introducing them with the yogurt, alternating a spoonful of yogurt with a spoonful of something new. This completely backfired and made it so she wouldn't even eat her yogurt.

I did not go back to the feeding clinic. After about a week of presenting only yogurt she was back to eating her yogurt happily. I continued doing what I was doing before the feeding clinic, which was giving her little bits of whatever the rest of us were eating. She liked to put them in her mouth herself and her gag reflex was getting better and better every day. I am happy to report that she has only thrown up once in the last month, and that was because she took a giant bite of my husband's turkey sandwich and overwhelmed herself. She still isn't really eating full meals, but she is consuming enough little bits and bites that she started having semi-solid poops in the last couple weeks. She still nurses about every 3 hours throughout the day. Her pediatrician is happy with her progress, but wants us to see a specific GI doctor, so that will be our next step.

Multitasking

Eden loves to be snuggled and mommy needs to be able to do stuff around the house. Here I am snuggling her and making guacamole at the same time. I meant to post this last week. If you're wondering when I'm going to talk about cloth diapers again, don't worry, it's coming. Currently I'm getting reacquainted with my Brother 1034D serger so that I can serge a bunch of infant sized soakers for my gDiapers and various covers. I'm finding that the infant sized prefolds are just too bulky for a newborn sized baby so I need a stash of smaller soakers.

Not Just For Easter Anymore!

If you're like me, you stalk the aisles of Target waiting for Valentine's Day to pass so the Cadbury Creme Eggs appear on the shelves. Then when Easter is over you ransack the 50% shelves making sure you have just enough eggs to make it until next year. I didn't think I could get any more excited than I was last year when I found out they were gluten free, but something wonderful has happened...

They now make Cadbury Screme Eggs for Halloween!!! I'm so happy I could scream! Must be how they got the name ;) Oh happiness, thy name is Cadbury. I'd also like to send a special shout out to my daughter, Eden, who turns out does NOT have an allergy or intolerance to dairy. Had I discovered these eggs while I was still cutting out dairy, I probably would have cried.

FuzziBunz on Shark Tank

Tereson Dupuy, the woman who created FuzziBunz, was on the show Shark Tank this past Friday. I had never seen the show before, but I knew she was going to be on so I watched it. Basically, an entrepreneur makes a presentation in front of a panel of investors and hopes that one of them likes the product enough to invest. Tereson was asking for $500,000 in exchange for a percentage of her profits. None of the Sharks bit because she had made some bad business decisions and was involved in legal battles surrounding her patent.

That's right! Dupuy was granted a patent for her pocket diapers in 2003. And because I'm a nerd, I looked up the patent and read it. You can read it here. Granted I'm no patent attorney (actually I *am* a lawyer, I just don't practice) but I do find it interesting and I did take a class on the subject... er... 13 years ago. Anyway, so I read the patent and it does look like there are a lot of people out there selling diapers that infringe on her patent. The problem with a patent is that you have to sue people to enforce it and that can cost more money than it's worth to pursue. Perhaps Dupuy has reached the point where if she doesn't sue, she will be put out of business. I can see why none of the sharks would want to invest in a company that's likely to spend all the invested money on legal fees.

On the show, Dupuy mentioned that she made a bad manufacturing decision when she chose a factory in China. Apparently the factory sold her FuzziBunz pattern to a woman who is now mass producing the diapers and stealing what Dupuy claims is 70% of her business. I'm not sure how she came up with this number, but I am curious who she is talking about.

There are two companies that sell similar pocket diapers from China - Alva and Sun Baby. Both of these diapers can be bought for $5-$10 a diaper and are extremely popular among the cloth diapering community. I plan on buying some of each because I'm curious about them so you can look out for those reviews when I get a chance to try them out. It's possible she's talking about one of these companies, but they are different enough (they use snaps instead of leg elastic for the one size functionality) that they would never be confused for a FB diaper and on Shark Tank she claimed that even she couldn't tell the difference between her diaper and this other diaper that copied her design. The diaper in question might be Charlie Banana.

A few years ago Dupuy was threatening retailers that if they sold Charlie Banana diapers then they could not sell FuzziBunz. She later issued an apology to Gaelle Wizenberg, a former employee who was largely instrumental in the decision to move the manufacturing to China, but the apology reads like a legal form letter. There are certain phrases in there that scream "a lawyer made me write this". I suspect that she stands by her original letter, not the apology. Perhaps she was threatened with legal action and forced to write that retraction. You can read them both here.

P.S. I have never even heard of Charlie Banana diapers until now and I hardly believe that they are stealing 70% of the FuzziBunz profits. That's why I think her 70% comes not just from Charlie Banana, but the Chinese Cheapies like Alva and Sun Baby. If she wins even one lawsuit enforcing her patent, that sets a dangerous precedent for the other mass producers of pocket diapers. I just looked at the Charlie Banana website and they do look just like FuzziBunz. If this woman really did steal her diapers, I feel really bad for Tereson Dupuy - who I'm sure has learned her lesson and now makes all her employees sign non-compete agreements.

I said it before in an earlier post, but I'll repeat it here. FuzziBunz has excellent customer service. When I received my first order of FB, one of them had a hole in the outside PUL layer. I contacted them about this issue and they immediately sent me a replacement, no questions asked and they did not ask me to return the defective one. The fit of FB was also great for both of my twins. Neither one is a chunk, my kids all have skinny legs, and they both wore the size medium from 1.5 years to potty training (which was 3yrs for my daughter and 4yrs for my son). My son is tiny though, so please don't expect that the average 4 year old could fit into any cloth diaper, let alone a medium.

They have a really cute "build your own" diaper where you can personalize a FB. I might just have to get one for Eden; that princess print is calling out to me. I love that they are hand made in the USA and I see that Dupuy has another patent pending on a "No-Repel Fleece System". I support FuzziBunz and hope that others do as well. They continue to be my favorite sized pocket diaper (and I say that only because I have never tried the one-size version). Good luck, Tereson, I hope that justice prevails.