What a week!

Sometimes life gets so fully busy, it makes my head spin and that has been my last two weeks! How can I even tell you everything that's kept me from my blog! It's impossible. But I'll give you the lowdown and there's a couple things I've been dying to write about and they deserve a full post.

I spent two weeks ago sick with an UTI which by the end of the week took me to the doctors and the pharmacy for antibiotics. I hate antibiotics. No, I despise them. They wipe out every bit of good gut flora that I've been working so hard to establish so I can fight any cold or flu that comes along, in addition to healing from my discovery of the gluten intolerance. So... here we go again!

Then Nathaniel came down with a terrible stomach bug which sent him to bed with high fevers and flu like symptoms (I'll leave that up to your imagination). I was by his side the whole time and the fever started Sunday and didn't start to go down until Wednesday. That's when Caroline caught what he had and another one was in bed! I was on and off the phone with the nurse line. Finally on Thursday I took him to the doctor and they ran tests (which I didn't get back until Sat.). Of course Thursday night I knew I had succumbed to it also and all three of us were basically on water, pedialyte and gaterade. Not a great way to lose weight so don't try it! Poor Craig took care of us all. 

In the meantime, while tweeting "help!", I made a new friend Jen who tried her best to give me some advice during the fever of the kids. I'd been following her tweets because we're both Traditional Foods advocates and I like how she writes. I had no idea that she lives about 2 hours away from me! And has been talking to me from California while she's there. There's a lot of flu going around everywhere here and every cashier I talked to said they had had it and the receptionists when I'd call to reschedule appointments would say they just heard from three other people who had the flu.

To make a very long story short, Jen and I both get our raw milk from the same dairy and that farm was accused of having caused the stomach bug. We couldn't believe that because we had drank two gallons of the milk and the only one who was sick was Nathaniel and his friend had gone home sick with the flu the day before he got sick! 

That's when I found out the sordid world of the Health Dept. and the news media. The Farm sent out compassionate letters to it's customers saying that two different testings of their milk (and they do them regularly) showed it to be 100% free of any pathogens. BUT the Health Department found three different families with this stomach bug who all drink raw milk, so they immediately draw the conclusion that it must be the source. Then they tested the milk from the families. All of it showed up as 100% free of any pathogens again. In the meantime, the small local newspaper had a reporter who decided to print the article that the raw milk of this farm was definitely linked to 6 cases of campylobacter! And it continued up to 20. The Health Dept. and the Dept. of Ag never stated that nor had production of the milk stopped. Farmer Edwin decided to hold off on production until all testing was completed just to be sure. He has gone above and beyond to make sure everything is safe. (Which by the way, his whole extended family drinks the milk and no one had gotten sick and many, many other customers were fine too.) The big problem here is that the little rinky dink article hit the main newswire and suddenly papers in Philly, Baltimore, and beyond were stating that there was definitely a link! That's when Jen and I stepped in and I left as many comments on each of their blogs stating that the paper misprinted the facts-- all tests were negative and that a link had not been established. We knew this could hurt the farm's business and that just isn't right. I also wrote the Farm-to-Consumer Legal Defense Fund to ask them for help and now they are following the story. I even got emails from Bill Marler! If you don't know who he is, then do you remember the Jack in the Box scandal with the e.coli in the hamburgers? His business is going after any food poisoning and he has a website designated about how unsafe raw milk is (sheesh). Actually today Bill wrote a very flattering blog post about Edwin Shank, our farmer and that was really nice of him, and totally caught us all by surprise!

So, with all of that going on, and the kids going back to school-- one on Monday, one on Tuesday-- and me finally getting out of the house for the first time today... that's why you haven't heard from me!

I really hope your week wasn't like mine. But we all have to have those weeks to appreciate the wonderful normalcy of every day. I'm so grateful for my health. And we found out that Craig can cook a mean Roast Chicken (and make delicious broth!) himself plus all the other sides... and clean up! I was so impressed. Though it's torture to smell a roast chicken when you're lying in bed unable to eat anything! I determined that that is exactly how heaven smells. I'm looking forward to it! 

Speaking of, Obama also majorly crossed Catholics and Christians in general this past week with the mandate to fund birth control and abortions in health insurance. This was a huge shock and I am upset about this too. I had just tweeted a link to an article about how bad birth control is for the mother and future children she may have and then this! If you've not heard of Natural Family Planning, then I urge you to find out about it. I'm sorry I didn't look into it before I had children but you can bet my kids will know all about it! I would hate to be in Obama's shoes right now!

More soon!