Happy Birthday!

Of course, birthdays are exciting. Especially your kid’s birthday. My daughter turned 9 yesterday—-last year of single digits. I don’t know how that happened so quickly! So, we celebrated her and spoiled her with presents, her birthday dinner of choice, birthday cake and ice cream.

But there is a side of me that mourns the birthdays that she used to have. Not sure if mourn is the right word here, but I think it actually might be and I’ll try to explain why—--I remember her 1st through her 6th birthday parties. She didn’t have a care in the world, nor should she. If you’ve read our story, you might remember that it was her 7th birthday that we started noting her symptoms of being diabetic, and she was in the hospital with a diagnosis 2 days later. She used to be able to pick out whatever she wanted to eat, and as much as she wanted to eat without having to ask if it’s gluten free or how much she needed to bolus. I didn’t used to mind if she snuck a few licks of extra frosting when I wasn’t looking, or wanted to have her leftover birthday cake the next day. And I certainly wasn’t up all night poking her fingers or giving her extra insulin trying to bring down a high blood sugar because I underestimated how many carbohydrates she had eaten. I feel like the type 1 diabetes and celiac disease diagnoses have made her have to grow up a little faster than I wanted. So I guess mourn may be the right word.

Now hold on…we weren’t throwing her a pity party. I mean, it’s still her birthday, and if my girl wants Sesame chicken for dinner, and a giant piece of chocolate cake for dessert——then we’re gonna figure it out and give the girl what she asked for! And for the record, she calls it Sesame Seed chicken, and I think it’s so sweet so there’s no way I’m correcting her on what it’s actually called.

For her dinner choice, all I can say is THANK GOD my husband can cook. Gluten-free take out options that we’ve found are sub-par at best, although I’ll be fully honest that we’ve been spoiled with his cooking and are a bit snobby at times about food. I’ve ordered gluten-free Chinese food in the past, and it usually is just a very bland dish. Kind of just gets the job done, but nothing to get too excited over. I appreciate the fact that there are options, but I just knew that we could do better. As a side note…I also have a weird thing with raw chicken, so despite the fact that I do cook many of the dinners in our home, this will not be one of them. But to be fair he’s a much better chef (I mean, it’s literally his job so he should be) and also isn’t a psycho about raw chicken so he gets to make this one. Anyways…one of our favorite cookbooks—that one from America’s Test Kitchen How Can It Be Gluten Free? has a great orange chicken recipe in it. With a few adjustments, we use it to have sesame chicken. I won’t give away the whole recipe, but it does incorporate a marinade, and then uses egg whites and cornstarch before deep frying the chicken. Gives it the PERFECT crispy coating, and then you just toss it in the sauce (just because I’m not making it, but truthfully it is a bit of work). He added the sauce, sprinkled it with some sesame seeds, and I’m telling you——gluten-free or not, this is the BEST Sesame chicken you’ll find.

We served the chicken alongside some jasmine rice, egg rolls (store bought so I just bought her some gluten-free ones and regular for everyone else) and steamed broccoli. If you are gluten-free, do yourself a favor and buy a rice cooker. A decent rice cooker at that. We make SO much rice now a days, and it’s honestly the easiest thing. Measure out the rice with the little scoop that comes with it, fill it to the water line and press a button. No worrying if you have the heat too high or too low, or having it bubble over the side of the pan onto the stove. It’s definitely worth the investment to get one.

Now here’s where I got to contribute. She wanted a big unicorn birthday cake. Last year I bought a birthday cake because I hadn’t done too much with gluten-free baking. I spent $80 on a 2 layer 9” round cake with a unicorn face on it. And it was SO disappointing. Super dry, with WAY too much frosting and despite a few good pics of her smiling next to it, it felt like a huge waste of money. This year, she wanted chocolate cake, so I went with my go-to recipe from Chef Alina. And it was absolutely delicious. I didn’t do the math of what it actually cost, but I’d say maybe $5? The part that I knew I would struggle with though was the decorating. I’m not the best cake decorator——I’m still practicing. I knew if I tried to draw a unicorn face on this thing and just make a horn out of gum paste or whatever my oldest daughter was telling me to use from a baking show she’d watched, it would end up looking like a cake on an episode of Nailed It.

Here’s what I (or I should say we because my daughters helped me color the frosting and they filled between the layers) did. We filled the cake with a vanilla marshmallow frosting. Then I first did a layer of white frosting on the outside of the cake. Then put a strip of teal and a strip of pink around the cake and spread it together with a spatula. Lastly, I mixed the teal and pink frosting in a piping bag and piped the top. My daughter sprinkled some unicorn sprinkles on top and there ya have it——a $5 unicorn cake.

Nowwwwwwwwww the fun part. Bolusing for all of this. I counted the carbohydrates up, bolused 75g to start for the Sesame chicken and rice. And then life happens—-one kid starts having a tantrum upstairs, and I’m gone from the table for a bit. When I came back down, my daughter was finishing her (?) helping. So we added 15g more to the bolus in hopes of covering it. Took a break for a bit and cleaned up from dinner, and did presents. So we prebolused while we did presents for a piece of birthday cake. This time we did 75g and extended it out just a bit so she wouldn’t drop low in between——I think we did 60/40 over 30 minutes or so. And for a while it looked like things were fine. Until bedtime that is——it always seems to be right at bedtime that diabetes decides parents aren’t allowed to sleep anymore. Her pump starts alarming——250, double arrows up. Five minutes later—- 285, double arrows up. Five minutes later—- 320, double arrows up. If you’re unsure of what I mean by that, the CGM is predictive. So double arrows up means that it thinks your blood sugar is going to keep spiking up. I’m sure my blood pressure is doing the same thing while I watch those numbers climb…

It finally stabilized at around 380 and just decided it was fine there. Despite having plenty of insulin on board, meaning the bolus went through and insulin was available in her body to use, her blood sugar just wasn’t budging. So there I sat, watching her blood sugar on my phone every 5 minutes for hours. Waiting for it to come down and seeing if I could or should bolus her more. It sounds dramatic, but it kind of is. A few hours later, it did come down to normal levels.

Each time things like this happen, we learn from it. We’ve learned how to better bolus for pizza, pasta, and gluten free bread. Apparently there’s still work to be don on figuring out Chinese food and birthday cake. What could we have done differently? Probably added way more insulin to the second bolus. Been more aggressive and not so afraid of a low. We’ll get there. One of the biggest things I’ve learned over the past 2 years is to give ourselves a little more grace. There won’t be perfect numbers every day—or sometimes even every week. But she had an amazing birthday, we got her blood sugar back under control the next day, and we’ll do better the next time.