Healthy rewards!

It is Thursday (*sigh*). We have almost made it through another week! We took Mia back to NEMC to get her brace and last night was her first time wearing it. We spent about a half-an-hour before bed getting her "warmed up" to the idea of this new contraption that she will be wearing on her leg every night while she sleeps. I realized she was going to need a little bit more than just verbal persuasion. So, I got the idea to get out a marker and color on the brace and make it look fun and pretty for her...and less scary. So, we drew a picture of a sun, a flower, a butterfly, hearts, AND her favorite cartoon characters, Charlie and Lola (www.charlieandlola.com).

She calmed down a bit, but still wasn't totally convinced. So, my husband said the phrase that I am sure all parents say at some point when they are desperate - "If you wear the brace all night long and don't take it off, Daddy will get you a special treat!" After that, there were some tears still and at one point she said to me, "Momma, take it off!" However, she finally calmed down and went right to sleep and did not take the brace off. I had to go in this morning at 8:45 a.m to wake her up and was very pleased to see that she had slept through the entire night and did not take the brace off once. The brace is velcro, but I don't think she knows how easy it is to get it off. Hopefully, she won't ever find out!

So, to make the day a little bit more pleasant for her, I decided to do a trial run of her cupcakes that I will be making next week for her birthday. Originally, I had planned to just go off of her diet for one day and let her have a regular cupcake on her birthday...that was until she had a flare-up a week and a half ago. She woke up in the morning and could not walk. We believe it was a result of something she ate the day before that caused her joints to stiffen, creating incredible pain which prevented her from walking. So, after that scary incident, I decided to play it safe and stick to her gluten-free, dairy-free, egg-free diet by making "special cupcakes" for her birthday. A friend of mine recommended the Cherrybrook Kitchen Chocolate Cake Mix. So, I tried it yesterday and it was fabulous! Even my husband ate an entire cupcake! For the cake mix I substituted the vegetable oil for coconut oil and I used gluten-free vanilla extract instead of regular vanilla extract. For frosting, I used the Cherrybrook Kitchen Vanilla Frosting Mix - it was very good! However, I DO NOT recommend trying to make cream cheese frosting by substituting Toffutti's Better Than Cream Cheese for regular cream cheese - it tasted and looked like Elmer's Glue! BLEH!

Mia LOVED her cupcake! It was a special treat for her and something I can take to other birthday parties as a healthy and safe alternative to regular cupcakes.