[DanaC]

Thanks hon. I suspect though, as is often the case with this sort of thing, that it was more traumatic for mum and dad. Must have been hard for my big brother too, I think. So much of his childhood and early adulthood was dominated by my health crises.

We all learned some lessons thought those experiences. It's one of the reasons I am so skeptical about 'alternative medicine' and faith healing (yep, tried that too :p).

When I see the recipes you come up with to allow your kids to experience similar food types to other kids - the realistic looking hotdog buns spring to mind :P - it always reminds me of Mum and the lengths she'd go to, the sheer inventiveness involved, along with the expense of buying hard to find non-standard ingredients and replacement foods, to try and inject a degree of normalcy into the various weird and wonderful diets that we tried.

We had some wonderful successes, some heroic failures and some truly hysterical mishaps along the way. we still reminisce about the green jelly (jello) she made for my birthday party one year. It was truly awful, but bless them my brother and my older cousins all made happy eating noises whilst they choked it down.

On the success side, I still sometimes make the pasta-less lasagna she used to make for me, using thin cabbage leaves instead of pasta. I have replaced the goats cheese with ordinary cheese though. funnily enough I saw something called courgette pasta the other day in the supermarket. I think it was courgette, anyway, some green veg. Strips of it, curled like tagliatelle for use in place of pasta. I had to smile: Mum was ahead of the curve on that one by decades ;p