Beans, beans and more beans...

Most people spend back-to-school time ordering supplies, adjusting their routine and stocking up.  Fortunately, my son's school does not require us to buy supplies, I purchased his uniforms months ago when they were on sale and his backpack and lunch bag from last year so I thought we were in pretty good shape.

I've been spending back-to-school time doing veterinary stuff with the pets.  Specifically, the cat.  Duchess.  Not only is she royalty in name but also demeanor.  She does not like veterinary clinic settings.  I'm not sure if it was last year or the year before, but we went through a brief scare that she had diabetes.   This shocked me because she is a 6 pound, mildly underweight cat who eats canned food.  Canned food is kind of like the "Atkins diet" and so canned food can actually be therapeutic for diabetics.  Well, it ended up working out that she had a high blood sugar and sugar in her urine just because she get's that stressed when she goes to a clinic.  This year, she was doing better so I was quite unnerved when I took her to the cardiologist and he told me she had such high blood pressure she could lose her eyesight and have a stroke.  Follow-up has concluded that she was actually just really stressed.

The dog has his routine follow-up stuff but nothing too exciting there yet (at least for now).

Now my two-legged kid.  He has food allergies and is a finicky eater.  That just makes life pretty fun. He's very excited about eating hot lunch at school.  We had it all worked out and then it occurred to me that the fact that we hadn't given him beans could be a problem.  I know this paragraph is weird, but bare with me.

My son is allergic to cashews, green peas and for a brief time beans.  His allergist thinks he has grown out of these allergies or if not, is close to.  He directed us to get him to eat beans to confirm he didn't have a reaction.  I've been casually trying him to eat beans all summer to no avail.  As the start of school approached, I told my husband we were going to have to take him to his favorite taco place because those are the only beans he said he would eat.  He ate them.  Success.  I called his doctor and reported that.  The staff member told me, "Now what about white beans and kidney beans?".  "What?"  The staff member actually said, "Wow- I heard you deflate over the phone!"  I tried to tell her it took a whole summer to get the kid to eat black beans, and school started in less than 2 weeks.  I was pretty sure the school nurse wasn't going to let him get school lunch unless we had an official letter.

We had just paid over $250 for lunches and my son was actually excited about school lunch.  Last year it was a success if he drank his milk and ate chips.  What is a mother to do?  I'm not one to accept defeat (even my son has noticed this- "Mommy, why do you always win?").  I communicated with my husband that when he got home, I was headed to the grocery store.  I went to the fancy "weird food" grocery store that I knew would have beans "mixed" into things and I looked up recipes on Pinterest.  Unfortunately, I didn't see any "bean baby food" to mix into things.  But I got bean tortilla chips, bean nacho cheese chips (my son immediately figured out they weren't Doritos).  I got a bean burger.  I made chocolate kidney bean brownies (they weren't bad).  I made oatmeal cookies with butter beans and great northern beans.  (Fortunately, my kid eats hummus so garbanzo beans have always been good).  He may have only taken a few bites of each of my concoctions, but that was all he needed to do.

I stayed up late, cooking and cleaning thinking, "What I wouldn't give to have to go shopping for school supplies rather than to get creative with beans."  Oh well- if you haven't figured it out by now, this blog is called All Creatures Great And Crazy for a reason....