The worst holiday I ever had was a week in Tenerife about 10 years ago.
We’d booked an apartment by the beach, and taken our 14-month-old daughter. Sounds good, yes?
No. She woke up early, she wouldn’t go to sleep, she woke up screaming in the night. She’d always been colicky and a bad sleeper, and we just thought it was more of the same … we did everything we could to keep her quiet in this apartment block with paper-thin walls, from reading stories at 2am, to dressing dollies at 4.30am. Plus, of course, we had the nightmare nappies to deal with, endlessly. We took it in turns, but oh dear, were we tired.
Our lowest moment was walking up and down the unlit road outside the block in the pitch black – when all the party people who were actually enjoying their holiday had gone to bed – desperately trying to feed her Weetabix, with the idea that perhaps she was hungry.
Yes – there’s the mistake. Weetabix.
Don’t get me wrong – Weetabix are great, they mash down beautifully for weaning, they absorb lots of lovely calcium-rich milk, and 2 out of my 3 children love them. But they contain 105% wheat. Yes, you read that right. According to the Weetabix site, they are made with 105g of wheat per 100g of finished product.
So we were unwittingly the cause of this disastrous holiday – unwitting, because she was not yet diagnosed as coeliac, and needing a diet that is 100% free from wheat (and barley, and rye). So I don’t feel guilty, except about the loss of sleep caused to our holiday neighbours.
If that was you, I’m sorry. I won’t do it again.
I’ve entered this post into Babylune’s writing contest about making parenting mistakes – follow the link to enter one of your own.
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I’ve written a book summarising what we’ve learnt over 20 years of dealing with the gluten free diet, and it might be just what you’re looking for. It packs the lessons we’ve learned into what I hope is a helpful and straightforward guidebook. It’s available on Amazon, as a paperback or for your Kindle… |
