I just got over my first cold in over a year. It lasted 4 days and thankfully Anna didn't seem to get it. If you have been following our blog you know by now that Wende and I have acquired germophobia. Wende has shared on the blog today how her behaviors have changed as a result of being a parent of a child with CF.
My neuroses has taken a different manifestion. Anything I can do to keep our family from getting a cold or the flu captures my interest. I took a nutritional seminar on lab based nutrition and after learing the proper therapeutic doses have been stuffing vitamins into our kids.
I heard that some friends of ours were milling their own wheat because of the purported health benefits. Supposedly there are important nutritional components in freshly milled wheat that breakdown quickly and are no longer present in store-bought bread or flour. We noticed that a homsechooling family that we are close with (5 kids) never got sick-- and they attributed this to milling their own wheat and making their own bread. It was interesting that the week they were out of grain and didn't have their bread the kids all got sick. This got my attention. I have since met others who swear by milling their own grain.
I was referred to Breadbeckers.com and began reading the articles Sue Becker posted on her website and received her free CD on the topic. Over the course of this past year I read up on the topic whenever I could. If you are interested, this article published by Ecological Agriculture Projects supported by McGill University in Canada outlines the history of refined white flour and goes into detail on the specific nutritional benefits of eating freshly milled grains. Basically, most of the phytonutrients that naturally exist in wheat oxidize and decompose quickly and are completely removed to produce white flour.
So I took the plunge last September, bought a countertop grain mill and some red wheat and began making bread. Wende certainly doesn't have the time to do this. I took it upon myself as the "bread winner" of the family - no pun intended. We still consume white flour but add home made bread or muffins to our diet. The bread tastes awesome and the kids love it. I have a bread machine that I use to make the dough. I usually set it all up before going to bed and put the breadmachine on a timer so when I wake up the bread is ready to go. The kids prefer bread baked in the oven in a traditional bread pan instead of letting in bake in the bread machine. We usually have fresh bread for breakfast every other day.
(I don't want to say this too loudly, but aside from a brief cold in the house just before Christmas our kids haven't gotten sick yet this season.)
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