More crunchiness

It's official, folks: I've crossed over to the Dark Side of crunchiness. And not by choice, either. In fact, I'm fairly disgusted by what I've had to resort to doing lately. Any guesses?

I'm giving my kid almond milk.

Every crunchy hippie in the free world will bore you silly with unsubstantiated claims about how bad cow's milk is for you, and I just don't believe any of it. As long as you're not lactose intolerant (which we are not), I think milk is perfectly fine. And as we've discussed before, Katie can't get enough milk. She loves the stuff.

But, ever since our bout with the stomach flu, things have been, er, not quite right in Katie's tummy. I don't want to gross you out with details, so let's just say I called the advice nurse to see what we could do about, um, firming things up a bit. The first thing she suggested was bananas. No dice, Katie has zero interest in bananas. Pasta, we've been doing. Ditto rice. Then the nurse asked about how much dairy Katie is having daily. OMG. Stop, she said! I told her I can't, I've been trying to get her to give it up for a while now but she's really attached to it. So the nurse suggested rice, soy or almond milk.

Despite my general loathing of these ersatz milks, you could probably hear my tires screeching as I made a U-turn and headed back toward Trader Joe's. I'll try anything to get these tummy woes to stop! But I had very little hope that Katie would accept anything less than her lovely organic whole cow's milk. I bought a box of "Rice Drink" (ew!), a carton of almond milk, and, as a backup, a small carton of nonfat milk in case the other two failed. The nurse said it's probably the fat in the milk that makes the diarrhea worse, so nonfat might be slightly better than whole.

And, unbelievably, Katie slurped down the first un-milk I tried: almond! She didn't say a single peep of complaint. She didn't even seem to notice the difference. (But she must have noticed; it's vanilla flavored!) She drank some on the drive home from TJ's, more that night before bed, more this morning when she woke up, and even more to and from our trip to Target. I keep waiting for her to declare it "Yucky!" like she does when we try to sneak Tylenol into her normal milk. Usually there's no fooling this little girl!

So we're coming up on 24 hours without cow's milk, and I sincerely hope it makes a difference. Enough with the tummy woes!