Today is Feast Prep Day! Tuesdays are my day off, and I’ll be spending this Tuesday cooking a turkey and all the fixin’s! We’ll be spending the majority of Turkey Day over at my parents with the extended fam that is around (which is still a helluva lot of people!) Heading over for breakfast and then hanging out until just before dinner is served. I admit to using Sean’s food allergies as an excuse to do our own. The truth is a bit more complicated than that.
It IS much easier to make a fully GFCF dinner than to pick and choose between what is being served at someone else’s house, combing through there recipes and ingredients. There’s hidden gluten in places people would NEVER think to look (like most prepared gravies) and dairy in just about everything (mashed potatoes, cauliflower au gratin.) Even the jello salad has whipped cream on it. And the green salad is pretossed with croutons. Thanksgiving isn’t a gluten and casein free friendly holiday (neither is Christmas, since it’s basically the same menu maybe trading out the turkey for a goose and throwing in a ham… mmmm…. ham!) And sure, I could make and bring Sean his own dinner (but then I’m making a whole dinner anyway.) But I’d have to make sure Sean was eating his own roll, not one of the regular ones. Are those Sean’s mashed potatoes or the ones with milk and butter? Oops, someone brought a cherry pie, but I only made GFCF apple and pumpkin – of course, Sean wants to have the cherry one… Well, you can see the headaches already. And that’s just the start.
But the other problem is that Sean just gets overwhelmed by large groups. He gets sensory overload and starts to shut down. He doesn’t have meltdowns (thank goodness!) but he’ll go off and play in a corner by himself. And that hurts my heart. Here we’ll be in a housefull of kids and he’s in a far corner of another room, babbling to himself. Off in his own world. Sometimes I’ll even find him in one of the guest bedrooms, he’ll have put himself to bed because it all just got to be “too much”. It’s such a stark reminder that he’s not like the other kids. That he’s “special”.
And so I try to keep our time in these situations on the shorter side. My mom doesn’t really understand and has been badgering me about staying for dinner. We’ve been doing this every holiday for the past year. You think she’d get it by now. I know she wants her family around as much as possible. And if I didn’t work with her everyday, this might be more of a valid arguement!
But that’s just it, too. I want to spend time with my kids. And when we are at these big family gatherings, I hardly even see them. So I am selfish and want to have some quality just our family time too. When we leave my parents, we head home to food already cooked and ready to heat ‘n eat (which is why I’m cooking today.) We watch movies and play games, usually throw a log or two in the fireplace and just relax. While I love visiting with my sibs and their kids, whom I don’t see all that often; this “just us” time is by far my favorite part of the whole day.
