I really want to blog more than once a fortnight, but OMG I am so effing TIRED. I hardly know which way is up or down any more. Sleep deprivation has taken its toll and I have been reduced to a mere shell of a mama. Clear thinking I am not. I am dull with fatigue. All the colour has bleached out of me, leaving a faint wash of weary, dreary grey.

I’m finding it hard to stay up past bunny’s bedtime. And that’s the only time I have to blog. The rest of the day is hopeless since bunny keeps my hands fully tied from dawn to dusk. He’s the Duracell Bunny. Not to be confused with the Energiser Bunny, which is the American rip off version.

But I digress. I didn’t come online to blog about battery bunnies, fascinating topic that it is. Instead, I wanted to blog about bunny’s ailments. Bunny and I are falling way down the rabbit hole of food intolerances. There’s nothing left to eat. Really. We are withering away.

I spent a bucketload of dosh on blood tests which apparently aren’t all that accurate. Anyway, we don’t get the results for 2 more days. In the meantime, I am racking my addled, sleep-deprived brain for recipe ideas and toddler snacks that don’t have any gluten, grains, corn, soy, dairy, eggs, sugar, fruit, tomatoes, potatoes, chicken, pork or turkey in them. If you have any ideas, PLEASE send them my way.

Up until today we were living on rice. We were eating more rice foods than you can shake a stick at. Rice cakes. Rice crackers. Rice cereal. Rice bread. Rice protein drinks. Rice milk. And rice itself of course. We had rice coming out of our ears. It was the last staple in our desert of a diet. I was clutching at rice straws with my last bit of strength. Thank goodness there was something to spread a little avocado on. Something white to splash over our sugar-free rice crispies. Something to crunch as an afternoon snack.

And then guess what? Today we have to eliminate rice aswell because despite all our food eliminations, bunny is STILL suffering from horrible symptoms. It’s unbelievable. Inconceivable. But there it is. The naked truth. We have nipped our options down to a nub. Nothing left for us to eat but vegetables, beans and meat.

I’ve been a vegetarian for the last 25 years, and I am almost at breaking point. I actually cooked  a couple of grass-fed beefburger bites for bunny this evening. He wolfed them down with great gusto, in true carnivore style.  All that vegetarianism in the womb has given him an appetite for blood.

This effort of extreme elimination has a purpose. We are desperately trying to reach baseline. Mostly for bunny. I don’t really give a monkeys about my own symptoms (although I would like just a tad more sleep and less of an itchy bum please). More than anything I want my baby boy to feel better, to eat better, to sleep better. If he sleeps better, then I will sleep better. If he’s happy, then I’m happy.

Baseline means that bunny doesn’t have any symptoms for at least 4 weeks. In other words: no rash, no pimples and no spots on his body, no eczema, no scaliness behind his ears, no compulsive ear tugging, no fussing and kicking at bed-time, and sleep cycles for more than 30 minutes at a time with no crying in between. So far the elusive baseline, has well… eluded us. We haven’t got there yet, but we will. I’m determined. I’m not going to let these foods get the better of me and my bunny.

We might have to eliminate beans. That’s next on the list. If nothing else it will certainly smell a bit sweeter around here.