Enjoy Life: Nut-Free and Delicious

My family has been loving Enjoy Life products lately.

Enjoy Life products are free of the eight most common allergens. They contain no: wheat, dairy, peanuts, tree nuts, eggs, soy, fish or shell fish. They are also made without casein, potato, sesame and sulfites.

I am impressed with their standards. If you deal with food allergies, I'd recommend checking them out: www.enjoylifefoods.com.
They also have a wonderful blog: http://www.enjoylifefoodsblog.com/

Now let me tell you what we tried out.

A few months ago, I was contacted by Enjoy Life and asked I would be interested in sampling some Enjoy Life Granola products. They sent my family 3 packages of granola: Cranberry Crunch, Very Berry Crunch, and Cinnamon Crunch.

The kids couldn't wait to try them out. We had them the afternoon they arrived. When I explained they were nut-free, my son that has a peanut allergy was really excited.

He tried them all out.


His favorite was the Very Berry Crunch. Out of my three boys, 2 of them loved the granola. Both my husband and I enjoyed it too. I just snacked on it plain, right out of the bag. I think it would be wonderful mixed in yogurt. My third son enjoyed it the most, I think. In fact, he preferred it over the sugary cereals I offered him the next day. He had a bowl of granola in milk.


This week, I received some Enjoy Life Boom Choco Boom bars that I won from an Allergy Twitter Party.


Again, my son was thrilled to get a treat that was allergy friendly.

I made him share with his brothers.

They all really liked the candy bars. My boys each had a favorite bar.
It worked out perfectly because we had 3 varieties: Boom Choco Boom: Dairy Free Rice Milk Bar, Boom Choco Boom: Dairy Free Rice Milk Bar, and Boom Choco Boom: Dark Chocolate Bar.

I was not surprised that they each preferred something different.


I was surprised by how good the candy bars tasted. The part I couldn't get over was the dairy free. Dairy free chocolate? Oh, but it was really good. My favorite is the dark chocolate bar.

These products were wonderful. I know we will get them again. They are available at several local groceries stores and they can be bought online.

If you deal with food allergies (or even if you don't), I'd suggest checking them out.

If you want to check out some other wonderful food related posts, including some delicious recipes, head over to Ann Kroeker's blog for Food on Fridays.

Latest on Sarah

I just got this update. Please keep praying for Sarah. I appreciate it tremendously.

Hi,
We are all home.
"Good" news is that the laryngeal cleft (hole in the airway) that was
repaired on Sept 21 is healing nicely.

Sarah's air pipe and voice box is very inflammed. The doctors do not know why. The doctor ran lots of tests: numerous blood tests, urine test, fluid from both lungs, and cultures/tests from the air pipe. We won't get the results from the tests until Monday and some of the test will take a week. So, they can't treat it until they know what it is. Something is going on, but they don't know what. So, we are all home.

Thank you for your prayers.

John & Carrie

Pray for Sarah

Please pray for my 3 year old niece Sarah. She had surgery 7 weeks ago to fix a hole in her airway. (Here's the post about that surgery: September 21.) The recovery hasn't gone as they had hoped it would. They believe she is still aspirating. My sister's email below explains everything. Please pray for them. Pray for Sarah, the doctors, the surgery this Friday and my sister, Carrie, her husband John and their little boy Matt.

Thanks so much.
Jane Anne



Here's John and Carrie's message-

Since we had such a good response to this method:

Guy Version: Sarah's recovery hasn't gone as well as the doctors had expected. She will have surgery again on Friday. Please pray that the doctor finds something.

Girl Version: Many of you have asked how Sarah's recovery has been. We haven't sent out an update because we really didn't know what to tell people. The past 7 weeks since her surgery, it has been cold and flu and H1N1 flu season. So, how do you know when your child is sick as in normal child sick like most children are right now with the cold or flu or H1N1 flu and how do you know when it is post surgery related? That is the question that even her doctors had all agreed was hard to define. But now that 7 weeks have past and all "normal sickness" treatment methods have been tried, all doctors (her primary care doctor and her pediatric ENT--Ear Nose Throat doctor that did the surgery) agree that what has been going on with Sarah is not the normal sicknesses that have been going around.

She has not been 100% healthy since her surgery. Some days are better than others, but she hasn't had a symptom free week. She has coughs, sore throat, and other cold-like symptoms. The major thing that really concerns all the doctors is that once a week Sarah has been getting a fever. Not a high fever, but I learned today from the ENT that Sarah getting a weekly fever is actually more troubling than just getting a high fever. Previously, her primary care doctor prescribed antibiotics to see if that would help, but Sarah still got a fever while on the antibiotics and after she was off of them--telling the doctors that this isn't a normal sickness.

She has been monitored closely by her doctors in the past 7 weeks. After getting another fever yesterday, per the primary doctor, I called the ENT who wanted to see her immediately. Today Sarah went to Johns Hopkins and saw the ENT. The ENT is very concerned about Sarah and her poor recovery. With the ongoing fevers, there is a good chance that Sarah is still aspirating. The ENT again brought up that Sarah was in an extreme amount of pain while in the hospital that really concerned the doctors. At this point, she doesn't know what is wrong, but definitely said something is very wrong. She had Sarah have x-rays done today--chest x-rays and throat x-rays. I realized how concerned the doctor is when she said she wants to do surgery on Friday (less than 48 hours).

On Friday, Nov 13, Sarah will have surgery. They will do a bronchoscopy and laryngoscopy (basically putting a camera down her air pipe to look at everything from the previous surgery to fix the hole in her airway (laryngeal cleft). If the doctor finds something wrong, then she will come out and talk to us about it and then go back in and fix it. Depending on what she finds will determine how long of a hospital stay it will be.

PLEASE pray that the doctor will find something wrong on Friday so that she can fix it. Perhaps, that sounds wrong, but even the doctor said that if she didn't find anything we'd be worse off because we would still need to figure out what is wrong with Sarah, because something is very wrong. No news isn't good news, when you need to figure out what is wrong so that you can fix it. Sarah's health has been worse the past 7 weeks than before the surgery. The doctor did have a few theories of what could be going on/what complications could have happened but we won't know anything for sure until surgery on Friday.

We have to be at Johns Hopkins at 9 am on Friday and the surgery will start at 11 am.

Please, please pray that the doctor finds something so that Sarah can get better. Also, please pray for Sarah--after all that my sweet little 3 year old has been through the past 2 years, she hates doctors, hospitals and anything medical.

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