Today is Logan’s 14th Angelversary, and amidst the sorrow that accompanies today, I find myself filled with a renewed sense of purpose and hopefulness. Our lifestyle and diet are undergoing a titanic shift and I am excited to share our experiences with you, my readers, my family. In my last post I made the commitment to share our whole journey, not just the emotional processing and healing… Well, these lifestyle and dietary shifts have become a huge part of our healing through and processing Logan’s death.
Logan was born with complete Trisomy 13. This means that all of his cells had an extra 13th chromosome in his DNA. This is considered to be a “fluke” genetic occurrence that could happen to anyone regardless of their genetic makeup. All the same, Brian and I made the commitment to improve our health to ensure that we and our next children are as healthy as possible.
Part of this journey has led us to genetic testing to help us be more strategic about our efforts by influencing our epigenetics. If you are not familiar with the term, epigenetics looks at the environmental influences that turn genes on and off. Put very simply, epigenetics controls your genes and includes EVERYTHING including food, sleep, exercise, chemicals in the environment, stress, etc.
Upon receiving our results we made some immediate lifestyle and diet changes. The biggest change was becoming GLUTEN FREE and eating a modified paleo diet (thank goodness our Logan Garden has been so productive!).
We now know that there are many more changes we will need to make to ensure that we and our future children are as healthy as possible such as:
- Limiting our exposure to chemicals
- Eating clean and organic foods
- Taking high quality supplements
- Drinking filtered water
- Making and drinking bone broths
- Using essential oils to support our efforts
- Exercising and yoga
- Infared saunas
- Biofilm cleanse (oh man this will be a post)
- Oh, and I have more than a few pounds of excess adipose to release before becoming pregnant again
Thankfully, I fell in love with the idea and process of becoming a chemical free home and living a chemical free life many years ago when my mother was first diagnosed with breast cancer. Her experiences led me to research how to lighten my chemical burden and have led to a many years long love affair with making my own personal care and home cleaning products.
We will be taking this to the next level over the next several months (I am still holding on to commercial window cleaner and dishwasher pods for example) and I want to bring you along for the ride! Reducing our chemical burden can only serve to help every one of us. I want to share some of my favorite recipes and swaps that I have discovered over the years in addition to the exciting changes we get to make in the future!
You may want to join me in this process, you may want to just watch, or you may throw your hands up rolling your eyes calling me a hippy… Whatever your response please know that you are loved and I so appreciate you for your support during this incredibly challenging and difficult time in our lives. Writing this blog gives me a sense of purpose and I thank you for helping me stay connected when I wanted nothing more than to cut the strings and fly away.
I hope that you, my readers and support system, will enjoy the expansion of The Love of Logan to include our lifestyle path. The same content will continue to be posted, just expect to see more frequent posts with varying subjects. Sharing our experiences will help us to continue healing and growing and I hope that someone else out there will find value in our story.
Good Things:
- I started adding peppermint essential oil to my morning shake and it tastes like a mint chocolate chip shake!
- I am excited about expanding my blog
- Yesterday I got to see the midwife who delivered Logan, Angela, she is such a light ❤