Whoever Spelt It, Dealt It

Defying the culinary laws of nature, one hole at a time.

"Excuse me, do you have spelt donuts?"

Of all the unlikely phrases to ever come out of my mouth, this is easily in the top three. Yet, there I was in Whole Foods yesterday, bypassing the delicious delectables in their Baked Goods department and looking for something that defies the laws of at least three of the five senses.

Why? Because I'm a good parent.

When does feeding your child something that I can only imagine tastes approximately like a frosted pincushion (I wouldn't know, I like my donuts good and yeasty) constitute good parenting? When you're trying to save your kid's emotional life.

Gianni has been having, shall we say, difficulty adjusting to kindergarten. He is very bright, but also an extremely sensitive and super intense little kid. He throws tantrums. He melts down. He chucks hard objects at other kids. He hits. Let's just say we will not be receiving a Student of the Month bumper sticker any time soon. We have tried OT, behavior modification, role playing, time outs, and all of the usual tacks. We are now consulting a child shrink to help us figure out what to do next, and we are also grasping at straws with any number of alternative treatments, 100 percent of which I have openly mocked in the past.

This won't hurt a bit!

But even the most wizened and cynical parents get to a point where they are desperate; they will do anything to make the frustration go away. If someone told me that heroin was the only cure for what ails Gianni, I would tie him off right now. I would let a witch doctor dance over his purple-painted body wearing a gorilla suit and a thong if it would help even the slightest bit. At this point when it comes to diet, healing, meds, or outright ridiculous bullshit, there are no athiests in the terrifying foxhole of parenting.

Hence, spelt donuts.

We read on The Internets that sometimes sensory issues and impulsive behavior can be exaggerated by wheat in the diet. Apparently, some kids' digestive systems don't effectively break down wheat and it gets stuck in the intestinal tract and the wheaty goodness leaches out into the body at large and it makes them cranky. Or something like that. And we noticed that Gianni had a couple of really good days last week, and the common thread we discovered for both days was: he ate oatmeal for breakfast, and in general had a pretty wheatless day. As we discussed, if we discovered that twice a week he wore a jester's hat and his behavior improved, he'd never have a bare head again. So we decided to give it a shot.

So there I was yesterday, in Whole Foods, where I never shop, buying things I never thought I'd buy. I'd filled my cart to the brim with wheat-free, gluten-free goodies to sample and prayed that Gianni would never know the difference. And then, suddenly, in front of the $20 cheese, I had a post-traumatic flashback to the Pep-up.

I was also a difficult kid. (I know, shocker.) I acted up at school and smarted off and was generally every teacher's nightmare. I think if the principal could have expelled me, he would have tossed me out on my keister faster than you could say Anger Management. My parents, in their own desperation, decided that sugar was the culprit. They banned anything sweet or otherwise frosted and candied from our house. Cold Turkey. Being a junior sugar hound, it threw my world into an uproar.

If that wasn't enough, we now had to visit places more foreign than Saturn to buy our groceries. No more Eisner's in Eastland Plaza. And sure as hell no Whole Foods. We traveled into the bowels of our 1970s college town, to funky little back-alley stores where hairy people strummed guitars outside the door and they sold wheat germ in bulk. It was terrifying.

One day, in a magazine called Hippie Bullshit Weekly or somesuch, my dad discovered a recipe for something called a Pep-Up. It was some kind of smoothie shake that existed before they figured out how to make smoothies taste like fruit popsicles. The only ingredients I can remember for sure were wheat germ, brewer's yeast, and pure evil. My dad dragged me down to the funky, stinky store and excitedly asked the bemused employees where he could score some Pep-Up ingredients. Keep in mind that this was a place where people were firing up spliffs in the aisles and my dad resembled nothing so much as a Reactionary Insurance Salesman. Oh, the hilarity.

Anyway, we got our ingredients and headed home. My dad got out the blender and lovingly spooned ingredients to make his Pep-Up masterpiece. I watched skeptically. At the moment of truth, he proudly pushed the button on the blender. We were on.

Except.

He left the spoon in the blender. The glass pitcher exploded and threw Pep-Up into every corner of our house. Our kitchen smelled like a combination of bananas and Milwaukee's Best. I never got to taste it, but watching that catastrophe did pep me up considerably. In a sense, it worked.

So, thirty years later, the irony of walking through Whole Foods with a shopping cart full of Pep-Up is not lost on me. The things we do for our kids. Hopefully at least a few of these things taste better than a spoonful of wheat germ. If not, we go to Plan B. I'm not sure what Plan B is, but I think it has something to do with soy pudding.