It’s Finally Fall – Lots to Catch Up On

To start – OMG it’s been a long time! I’ve noticed that as my kids have exited the toddler stage and are into becoming little elementary school kids that our schedule keeps getting busier! Unfortunately because this is a passion project, it comes behind momming and working, but now that Fall has arrived (and where I live, it took a while to get out of the scorching 90 degree days), it’s time for an update on T1D Type A Mom and how things are moving forward.

New Recipes – I haven’t uploaded new pictures or recipes in a while, but that doesn’t mean I haven’t been making them or keeping track of carbs in them! I have a stack of recipes that I will be adding shortly. In the mean time, I have been posting them to our Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=61551948006328. It’s a quicker option to do on my phone if I’m running to the next task. I’ve also been slowly exploring the world of TikTok: @t1dtypeamom. I’m not good at it yet, ha! But I am trying to make short videos about my recipes. Fear not! Updates coming on the website soon!

Book – I decided I wanted to compile my recipes into a book so I met with a publisher and have a rough draft done. My original intent was to create a book with ALL my recipes, however there are simply too many at this point for a first book. After a lot of thought and discussion, I decided that a good dive in point would be to create a recipe book for the holidays, so each recipe is themed. They are pretty easy to do and I think provide a fun, lower carb option for celebrating. I am sure I have a lot more work ahead of me but if and when it works out, I can’t wait to share it with you. My hope is that if the holiday one can do well, that there are others coming. The ultimate dream would be to get to donate whatever money the book generates to Breakthrough T1D. But I don’t want to get ahead of myself :).

Speaking of Breakthrough T1D, this past Sunday we had our annual walk for Type 1 Diabetes. So many of our friends and family donated to the cause and showed up for our type 1 daughter. It was emotional in a good way, seeing all the people living with T1D and all the people showing up for them. Support is so important – it is the reason we keep going when it is hard. I hope these recipes are a type of support for you because as you know, I am no baker/chef/nutritionist, just a mom who wants the best for her kids.

It’s Summer Time

Well, we’ve finally reached it, the end of Maycember. Or MAYhem. Every year I think that April is my busy month since that’s when my biggest time of year is at work but nope, I simply shift to the biggest time of year in my children’s school lives. Baton recitals, baseball games, recorder recitals, sacraments, field day, end-of-year countdown, graduations. I think we probably did it all.

But now its SUMMER!!! I love summer. I love the kids being home (even if they are fighting). I love the vacations. I love the swimming. I love the outside events. And with all of these come the extra challenges of type 1 diabetes. This will be our third summer having T1D and I wonder what I’ll learn this go round as I undoubtedly have learned a lot over the last two. I’ve learned that she goes high in the heat but low when swimming and I’ve learned that she was high nearly our entire trip to the beach last year. The heat? The excitement? The relaxation? Who knows. But what I try to do the most in the uncontrollable situation is control what I can control and that is the food we eat.

This year, we’ll be heading to Disney World (super yay!!) and also to a couple of out of town competitions so I have been thinking about what to eat at these for months. And what I’ve decided is this: there will be some high carb food consumed, absolutely because she cannot live on the sidelines. But there’s also going to be a lot of food we are bringing with us because I can’t have fried chicken tenders at every meal (I think my kids could live on chicken tenders. They are good but really, all day, every day good?). So what foods do I get that aren’t going to go bad and travel well? Here’s what’s on the list so far: unsweetened applesauce pouches, travel size peanut butter cups, ranch dipping cups, carrot sticks, apples, nutella/pretzels on the go, peanut butter crackers, cheese crackers, YumEarth candies (for lows!), simply Cheetos, meat sticks, nuts, So Twistz low carb pretzels, fruit strips, fruit snacks and Keto bread. I’ll of course have to do a grocery order for fruit and veggies once there but I’m hoping snacky items like these are going to keep us satisfied. I want to have a wonderful trip – so I’m gonna try my hardest to balance our meals in a theme park and avoid an emergency. I don’t have it all figured out now, I’m definitely going to be learning on the go as well.

Before I sign off, one thing I decided to put on my to-do list is write a book of recipes. After a lot of thought, it’s going to be T1D recipes dedicated to the holidays. I’ve been working a lot on what recipes to put in and I’m ready to start compiling them together for lots of people to see. Maybe it’ll be successful! Maybe not haha! But I’d like to try because one of the hardest things about T1D is worrying about what to eat. I’ll keep you updated on the progress. Currently, it is slow, ha! Hopefully that speeds up once I get some alone time.

Quick Meal Mom Hacks

This morning we had another day of racing out the door for school and it made me super thankful I had food in the house that was easy to toss in a lunch bag and be used for breakfast. Over the course of the last 2 years with T1D, I have slowly been changing the way we eat. In our house, we still eat all things anyone else can have but I try to be as diabetic friendly with foods around our house as possible.

Lately, that has meant that when I have time (and let’s face it, time means both having physical time and also the energy to feel like doing something), I try to prepare foods that I toss in the freezer. We see blood sugar spikes from things like frozen waffles or mini muffins so that made me think, I can actually just do this myself with ingredients that I want. It started with french toast, I like to make it with Sara Lee Healthy and Delightful bread so I took an entire loaf of bread and turned it into the french toast and packaged 2 pieces together in foil for easy access. The kids get it out, pop it in the toaster, and it tastes just like I made it if I had had time that morning. So what else did I do it with? Grilled cheese. Meat/veggie egg quiches. Keto muffins (both regular size and I’ve invested in a mini muffin pan). Chili. Baked oatmeal cups. Most recently, I’ve been experimenting with bread baking so lots of artisan loaves, cinnamon raisin loaves and focaccias. Over Christmas break I also jumped into the world of sourdough (my starter is named Breadney Spears) and I’ve even gotten some cool recipes out of that, most popular would be waffles. If I’m being real though, my favorite thing I’ve frozen is Sara Lee bread, made with peanut butter and sugar free jelly, cut into an uncrustable – because that has saved our butt on more than one occasion when I’m backing out of the driveway and a kid yells “I forgot my lunch!”

I do spend a lot of time preparing these things but the beauty of the freezer is that I do it when I’m feeling like I need a project and not when I have to find something to eat. On a slightly different topic, a lot of my freezer things have been my sourdough lately – I’m only a month in to sourdough and I still need lots of practice (which I hate) but I’m determined to be successful. Some loaves have turned out gorgeous. Some have not been cooked in the middle :(. But one thing I like about it is when I cook with sourdough and keto flour, I just don’t see a high blood sugar spike the way I would with a bread that comes from the store.

Before I sign off for now, I must bring up the new cookbook I’ve been using. It’s called Bakerita and it is desserts that are gluten free, dairy free and refined sugar free. I’ve made some really neat things out of it and by and large my customers (children) have been pleased. And even though it is not a diabetic cookbook, I am highly pleased with the results of feeling like you can have desserts that don’t send you sailing into the 300s. I don’t officially endorse anything but I want people to know the fun I’ve had with this book.

It’s Fall Time

Man, I really wish I was able to write more on this topic, but as I’m sure any mom knows, there is not always a lot of time for side projects for myself. Even though it has now been well over a year for us with T1D, I still feel like we learn new things regularly. This disease is so frustrating!!

One thing in particular I had to learn was what things would be like on our first beach vacation. We have traveled to visit family since diagnosis but this past summer we went on our first beach trip with the family. Since we stayed in a condo with a kitchen, we planned to eat out 2 of the 5 nights we were staying and got foods we eat all the time for the other 3 dinners. Lunch and breakfasts were also things we eat all the time. This would make our trip relatively smooth, right? Wrong! Maybe it was the heat. Maybe it was the excitement. Maybe she was dehydrated. I don’t know what did it but she was high CONSTANTLY. And it was such a huge let down because on the long all-day car drive down to the beach, her blood sugar was perfect, leading me to believe I was in control with my plan. Never. The good news is she never got ketones so at least she wasn’t sick.

And now we are about 4 weeks in to a new school year. We have a new school nurse at our school this year and she is knowledgeable and communicative which is great! Of course we still deal with typically beginning of the year issues, most notably, a not-even-that-bad cough that wreaked havoc anyway. But as we’ve gotten back to normal there, I have found new hacks to make our days a little easier and that is mostly in foods we can always have on hand for meals or snacks. Two things I’ve started doing are making uncrustables and french toast for the freezer. Obviously I could buy these things but when I make them, I get to use the ingredients I prefer which is Sara Lee Healthy & Delightful Bread (18 carbs per 2 slices), Smuckers Sugar Free Jam (we’ve tried strawberry, blackberry, grape and raspberry), Jif peanut butter and eggs (for the french toast). It only takes about half an hour to whip up an entire loaf of bread into either of these things and having them in the freezer makes it super easy to pull out and either pop in the toaster (french toast for breakfast) or toss in the lunch box (uncrustable). I got my uncrustable cutter for a very reasonable price on Amazon and it has been well worth its cost.

Along with back to school, we also enter my favorite time of year – HALLOWEEN!! For the second year, I have created a Halloween candy carb content guide and posted it in the “Guides for Special Occasions” tab. This year I checked all the carb contents and made sure they hadn’t changed from last year and also color coordinated it so that you know which candies are gluten free and which are free of all of the 9 major allergens. I know candy is still not ideal, but in our family, we are committed to still getting to be a kid so that will mean candy gets to be eaten at Halloween occasions (with insulin of course). But it’s not just candy that I focus on, I love to make sure that we are full of Halloween spirit so I buy pretty much ALL the Halloween shaped snacks from the Target Halloween aisle (veggie chips, goldfish, cheezits, granola bars, cheese puffs, rice krispy treats, to name a few) and then I do silly things like draw pumpkin faces on clementines and ghost faces on bananas. I can’t help it, I just want to pass on my love of this holiday and holidays in general on to all I meet :). I will probably be doing some fun diabetes specific snacks as well, such as sugar free jell-o pumpkins and low carb sweets so stay tuned.

Speaking of candy, has anyone gotten to try the zero sugar Twizzlers, Hershey bars and/or Reese’s mini peanut butter cups? We did and I was really pleased to find that while we needed insulin to consume them, her blood sugar did not skyrocket after eating. I emailed the parent company to ask if they’d have Halloween candy that was zero sugar and at the time they did not know but I haven’t seen it in any of my (many) trips to buy Halloween things.

Have fun celebrating all things Fall!

Happy 2024

Happy 2024! As a family who was diagnosed with T1D right at the beginning of January 2023, getting through every “first” occasion and into 2024 was a big milestone!

Now is a busy time for me here as we prepare for a big season with my side job but I will continue to take pictures and update as I can. Once things slow down I’ll start searching for more recipes :). One thing I will say is having a list of all my recipes has made it easier for me to plan for dinner when I can’t think of anything since I can just refer back to my other dinners!

My First Blog for T1D Type A Mom

I am not a chef. Or a baker. Or very creative in the kitchen. When my daughter got diagnosed with Type 1 Diabetes in January 2023, I told her I would never stop looking for snacks and meals for her to eat.

My super power is in organizational skills. In a former life, I planned special events for a theme park and currently, in addition to running our household, I own dance company where I truly feel my biggest asset is keeping all my families informed on all of our plans. After the shock of our diagnosis, I knew that the way for me to not wallow in self pity about a disease that is hard to control would be to keep “control” by being organized.

My first step was to create my Family Food Binder. And over the course of 11 months, I looked up, tried, took pictures and documented every meal I made. It’s been really helpful, not only because I have carb contents already looked up for myself, but also because when I can’t think of what to make, I go back to the binder and am reminded of many things we can eat.

Not everything is a winner – she doesn’t always love what I make but I still keep all the recipes because she might like them someday as her tastes grow and change. What I hope for anyone reading this is that these recipes open the floodgates of ideas about things that you like and can create for your family.

The same goes for the pre-packaged snacks and breakfasts I’ve found. Again, not all of them are things we eat all the time but maybe they are things that you like. And before T1D, I didn’t know a lot of these snacks existed, so I’m happy to have a list for myself of fairly low carb things we can eat.

I hope you and your family are in good health on this journey.