As all of you (hopefully) know we recently moved to Colorado Springs. Conveniently enough, my sister lives only five hours from Colorado Springs so we decided to pack up the kiddos and head over to Garden City, Kansas to celebrate Christmas with my sister and her wonderful (and adorable) family. This year, mommy (me) definitely stepped it up a notch and I've got to admit that I am pretty proud of myself. In the years since Elli was born Christmas has always been interesting as far as food goes. The first year, she was only two months old, so there wasn't a lot of eating going on, but we celebrated her second Christmas just one month before she was finally diagnosed with food allergies. At the time she had just been diagnosed with a juvenile vomiting disease called Cyclic vomiting Syndrome, and was vomiting about three to five times daily. It turned out to be an incorrect diagnosis but that's what we were going on at the time. We decided to go to a Christmas party that we had been invited to anyway because we figured that life must go on and she couldn't stay in the house until she outgrew the illness. The party started off well and Elliana was happily being held by her uncle Josh...who was feeding her cheese. As you can imagine, the party got real interesting real quick. Needless to say we went home. The next three years all went pretty much the same. Elli usually ate the same meat as everyone else, her grandma Sharon would make her some potatoes without dairy in them (because she is awesome like that) and then she would have Rice Krispy Treats for dessert. We did very little holiday baking.
Finally, on her 6th Christmas (yes, I said 6th!) I finally got with it. We have enjoyed eating all sorts of goodies from banana bread to candy to sugar cookies and more! It has been a wonderful holiday season! In the weeks before Christmas my sister and I began to talk about how Christmas would look with Elli in the house. My sister is absolutely wonderful and was right on board with having everything be as Elli-friendly as possible. She wanted to do chocolate fondue so we decided that, instead of doing two different bowls of chocolate (one dairy, one dairy-free) we would do just one (dairy-free). We thought that if we did it that way she was less likely to accidentally eat the wrong chocolate, and frankly it tastes the same so why bother having both anyway? We bought pretzel rods and marshmallows and I spent a few days before Christmas baking banana bread. We had a full array of items to dip in the chocolate fondue and Elli was free to eat all of them! We did have a couple of loaves of bread that were not egg-free, but they were separated from the rest and Elli had no trouble knowing which was which since we cubed hers and sliced the others. We also had a non-traditional holiday meal - TACOS! I thought this was actually really fun and as a plus, Elliana was able to eat many of the things that were put out in the taco bar. I also made some safe sugar cookies to bring and on Christmas Eve we covered the table in foil and let the kids go wild...and boy did they! We all had so much fun and I am pretty certain that my sister will be finding frosting all over her house for the next few weeks!
Me and my sister, Erin, during the cookie decorating extravaganza!
Feliz Navidad!
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