My Green Family. ramblings of one family's journey to green living

Looking back thinking about how the idea for this blog got started its funny how things came together. Back around Christmas time Odum and I were talking about becoming more environmentally conscious and eco-friendly. We talked about things that we needed to do better not just for the environment but for our kids and their future. We wondered why we, and other people, didn’t do more green things in our daily life and came up with two answers, time and money. So we decided to quit talking and start acting. And while we were at it, why not start a blog and share all our crazy adventures?

I’ll take a step back here and fill in some gaps from last fall to now. We were beginning to become worried about Tristan’s lack of speech development in the fall and by Christmas time we where waiting for him to be assessed for this speech delay. The thought of autism had never even entered our minds. About a month later we decided to take Tristan to an ear, nose and throat doctor to rule out any possible hearing problem that could be causing his speech delay. I of course did a ton of research and found a few studies indicating that a milk allergy can sometimes cause fluid build up in the inner ear causing mild hearing loss. In that moment a light bulb went off since Tristan had suffered from infant colitis: he was allergic to the milk products I was eating when I was breastfeeding him and I had to stop eating dairy. So from that moment we decided to put Tristan on a dairy free diet.

Yet another month later I saw a discussion on my favorite message board about whether special diets could change behaviour in children. What sparked the discussion was a short documentary called Autism Yesterday which talked about the gluten free casein/dairy free diet and how it was helping kids with autism recover. I responded indicating I definitely saw a difference in Tristan when we took him off dairy. He was less in his own world and made much more eye contact with us. These were two symptoms we were really starting to notice and worry about before we started the diet. I also watched the documentary. I have never been more frightened in my life than I was after watching that video. Tristan’s behaviour was strikingly similar to the children with austim in the video, it was hard to watch. I knew in that moment that my baby had autism.

I began to do intensive research, so much research it felt like I was about ready to defend my PhD in autism spectrum disorder. I researched everything on autism, possible causes, symptoms, potential treatments, and especially this special diet and why it seems to help so many kids with autism. I was shocked at what I had discovered. Of course long before this I had heard all the controversy surrounding autism and vaccines being the cause. But I ignorantly brushed it off as people simply looking for someone or something to blame. I couldn’t have been more wrong, or uninformed. It wasn’t just vaccines that these parents where blaming but toxins that run rampant in our air, water and food. From pesticides on the lawns to genetically modified organisms in our food all this crap causes toxic overload in our kids. And some kids just can’t take it all; Tristan is one of those kids.

Could it be possible that this disease is treatable, that kids can recover and live “normal” lives? Could it be possible that the things that are meant to protect us and make our lives better could actually be harming our children? If so should we do something about it? Don’t we have to do something about it?

After all these events and after all my research we both knew how important this blog was going to be to us. Not only as a means to inform people how easy it can be to become green for the sake of our environment and children, but also as means to communicate, share and learn from others as we journey through this maze that is autism.