Maybe the confusion lies in my lens. Everything looks different. Like when I was trying to convince my dad to create more garden space in our generously-sized lawn. After days of pleading, I finally said, “Dad, what you see is lawn. What I see is me potentially getting healthy again without going broke.” Two days later he casually mentioned how the blizzard ruined his plans of tilling up some lawn for more garden space.
I, too, used to see just lawn, and I had no problem with it. In fact, mowing endless greens of homestead-sized lawns was my job of preference while growing up. But since those days of seeing lawn ten years ago, I have tripped and stumbled and straight-up fallen on my face onto paths that have lead me to seeing garden. From the moment I saw kids in that garden, nothing else has made more sense, and I’ve had a serious craving for something that makes sense. And not just “enough” sense or a “protect-the-bottom-line” sense or a “if-you-look-at-it-this-way” sense. Complete, undeniable sense.
Mix in a little grass-fed beef raising, whole food common-sensical cooking, and good old-fashioned healing, and potentially there is enough sense in the pot to satisfy my whole appetite. Potentially.
Feel free to grab a taste of Dakota Grub as it simmers through the summer and into fall, but be warned…the exact flavor is still a mystery to me. It might bite like a mustard green. All I know is I can’t go much further without talking about its roots: when I decided to become a stay-at-home Blabbee (and “Blabbee” doesn’t mean what you think).
BlabbeeCare
NOTE: the names of the little ones in my life have been changed to protect the innocent, and for my own personal entertainment. “Blue” got his name because of his blue, imaginative eyes.
Blue stood on top of the table circling, carefully eyeing his captive audience. The light above him made it look like the six of us surrounding the table were interrogating him, but it was the toddler, Blue, with all the control...of course. We grown-ups are always looking for an out on being grown-up. Suddenly, he stopped, pointed at me and, with certitude, declared, "Blabbee!" Blue, barely walking, wasn't saying much of anything with much accuracy so we laughed and shrugged it off. Although, "Blabbee" did sound alot like my name, "Kalie," said with a short "a" like California. Hmm.
"Hey Blue," my mom asked, after he had been adequately distracted, "who's that over there?" She pointed at me, his auntie. Blue turned around, stood solid, threw his arm out, pointed his finger in my face and announced my destiny.
"Blabbee!" he said, this time without question. Everyone laughed in appreciation of his entirely un-grown-up pronunciation and awed over his entirely grown-up replication. That boy knew his Blabbee.
Six nieces and nephews, two degrees, and three states later I'm sitting at that table where I was declared Blabbee. The kids all call me Blabbee still because, of course, all the toddler-wannabe grown-ups call me Blabbee around them so they had no chance.
My current "job", not even a year out on finishing my Master's degree, mind you, is taking care of my sister's two kids and her nephew on her husband's side. This nannying or daycaring or whatever it is has been dubbed "BlabbeeCare" by my sister. I didn’t argue. I knew the name had already stuck.
The idea of BlabbeeCare started in mid-December when my sister was looking for daycare at the exact moment my seasonal farm job was ending. I decided to help out by watching her kids for a couple of months until she found daycare. A couple of months turned into a couple of more months, and now I’ve guaranteed them through the summer.
My mom asked me once how long I was going to do BlabbeeCare and I said, “Probably as long as I’m home. I can’t see myself doing anything else.” She just laughed and shook her head. I’m sure I know what she was thinking, what everybody else thinks. A dietitian who just got her Master’s degree doing daycare of all things? But I don’t care. I once read a statistic in a nutrition publication that said that for the first time in recorded history the current generation of babies have a life expectancy shorter than the generation prior, and that one of every three kids are expected to have adult-onset diabetes…a completely preventable disease. So what better place for a dietitian than running a daycare?
Right now, the table that acted as Blue's stage is covered in garden starts. In them I don't see seeds that will become plants that will become food. I see the official start of a dietitian who will be away from any hospital, clinic, office, gym, or campus, and right in the middle of where she will learn and teach the most: with kids in a garden.
With any luck, the kids might eat something green, and I might finally find the time and the nutrients to heal my own immunocompromised self.
The Immune System
Nothing like waking up with half your face not working to make you wonder if your body is running at full tilt. This was my morning about two months ago. I didn’t notice it right away, I just noticed my eyes were bothering me so I went and looked in the mirror. Everything looked fine until I blinked and my reflection only winked. My left eye was stuck open.
I didn’t know what to think, and tried not to consider the possible causes. I walked to the living room where my sister was sitting and said, dryly, “My left eye won’t blink.”
She looked at me quite confused, witnessed the buggy-eyed wink, and said with concern, “Yyyyeah, you should probably get that checked out.” So I did.
What came up was Bell’s palsy, a paralysis of one side of the face. It’s when the facial nerve is being inflamed by a virus and shuts down its function anywhere from two weeks to two months, and maybe longer. I lucked out. From start to finish I only had symptoms for three weeks. After the eye shut down, my mouth did soon after. I slurred my speech, laughed with my mouth covered, and ate with caution…but I never drooled. One of our dogs had bell’s palsy once and drooled all the time, therefore a common question I was asked was, “Are you drooling?” I answered with a defensive No!, but I did have to tape my eye shut every night.
Bell’s palsy is not common in the average person, but more often than not shows up in those with weak immune systems. This was the kicker. I thought I was getting better. I thought maybe I had been doing something right over the past two years. But then I wake up with Bell’s palsy and feel like I’m not heading for better at all, but snowballing into worseness. No more excuses, I decided. I had to hunker down and follow through with all of the instincts I often pushed to the back of my head. For reals this time.
Those three weeks of taping, slurring, and slurping, I researched immune-building recipes, created meal plans, and saw an official alternative medicine guy who put me on whole food supplements and digestive helpers. He reinforced a fact I knew full well but never fully admitted to myself: I’m crawling with food sensitivities. I wanted to tell him, “No shit Sherlock,” but since I never did much about most of them – corn, wheat, and eggs – I kept my mouth shut. Instead I agreed not to eat them for at least three months to give my stomach time to heal, my fickle, fickle stomach.
The short answer to why my immune system is often MIA is: antibiotics. The somewhat longer story starts when I tore my ACL over two years ago and got it repaired with surgery. You know when they talk about those unfortunate few of the tiniest percentages who get the rarest of rare infection with surgery? Well, I made the cut. I was in the hospital for eight days, got two emergency surgeries, downed drug concoctions that would put Charlie Sheen to shame, and chalked up a couple blood transfusions to boot.
The worst part was, they were never able to culture the infection. They kept taking samples of my knee during the surgeries (what “sample” meant I never really cared to know) and tried to grow whatever bacteria that had seemingly taken control of my knee. Nothing grew. At the time I hated this reality because I thought it meant I was crazy. Was it all in my head? Now I realize that I should have been more concerned for my gut than my head.
Since they didn’t know what strain of bacteria it was, they treated me for a variety of strains to cover all the bases. Meaning I was on at least two of some of the strongest antibiotics on the market at the hospital, and I took one intravenously for four weeks just for good measure. I wore around a fanny pack where I loaded my self-deflating balls of antibiotic filled with what looked like a pee-yellow toxin. Once I hooked them up to my PICC line, they started deflating and I watched them drip, drip, drip into my body. Over sixty of those balls drip, drip, dripped into my body.
In the end, I believe those nasty antibiotic fluids saved my life. I’m pretty sure my white blood cells weren’t going to single-handedly stop the red rash racing up my leg, aiming for the arteries that count. But I paid for it with my immune system. The antibiotics killed not only the naughty bacteria, but also the beneficial bacteria spanning my whole body, tipping a balance that is tough to restore, let me tell ya. And that balance, I have learned, is the foundation for an immune system that won’t poop out on you when a virus thinks your facial nerve looks like a good place to settle down.
Someday virus, you and your buddies will meet your match in this here body. That’s the plan, anyway.
The Plan
After doing BlabbeeCare for four months now, the idea of a life I’ve always wanted but seemed entirely out of reach is kinda sorta coming together. I want to be able to cook all day every day, not just squeeze it in in the evenings. I want to be able to grow, raise, or barter the majority of the food I eat (including the grass-fed beef raised by my brother). I want to always have the time to heal myself and my family, no excuses. I want to raise awareness of what we’re feeding our kids and ourselves for that matter. Finally, I want to do all of this without the current drainage of my bank account.
One day I realized that what I had defined as my ideal lifestyle was very close to that of a stay-at-home mom, so I figured since I didn’t have any kids of my own, I had to borrow them. Thus, I became a stay-at-home Blabbee.
I created the blog because I figured it might help me follow through on tending the garden, cooking healthy meals for the kids, and putting forth the vast amount of work and planning it takes to actually heal a body, and not just erase the symptoms. We’ll see what happens. Maybe, just maybe, something that resembles “making sense” will muster before it’s all said and done with. Can't blame a girl for tryin'.
blog on blabbee! :)
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