Weekend Recap from the Gluten-free Cooking Expo in Chicago

In case you had your own crazy weekend and didn’t see any of the following tweets, I copied them here so you could read about the Gluten Free Cooking Expo in Chicago.  Kent, the kids and I all love Chicago and were excited that the Weston Price Foundation asked me to go, so we made a family weekend of it.  I helped at the WAP table, passed out my Kitchen Kop cards, sold a few Real Food guides and t-shirts (but not one bag!), and had a blast chatting with everyone.  The hotel didn’t have free wifi (darn it), so all I could do to keep in touch was Tweet all weekend.  I’ll make notes on some of the tweets below so I can share the whole scoop that didn’t fit in a Tweet, including exciting (?) details about my picture uploading issues and more about our hotel fire evacuation!  (Warning, there may be a little off-topic rambling involved.)

Once again it’s almost midnight and my post isn’t done yet and I won’t have time in the morning, either.  SO rather than taking the time to re-order all these Tweets please just do me a favor and GO DOWN NOW TO START AT THE BOTTOM AND READ UP!

• Testing Tweetdeck for tweeting pics, here's the Legos shot I wanted to show you… https://tweetphoto.com/19088670 about 14 hours ago
• @puppyshine Here is the link for the “Butter was framed” and “Legalize raw milk” shirts: https://ow.ly/1A0Vq 9:08 PM Apr 18th
• @StarSunFlower You may want to order because when they're gone they're gone, we're not printing more-shipping is a pain! 🙂 9:07 PM Apr 
• Today was amazing – I saw in some people's eyes that lightbulb moment when they realized that all they'd been told was keeping them sick. 3:43 PM Apr 18th
• Some saw “Butter was framed” shirts & cracked up. Others wanted me to explain & were open to hearing about Real Food. 3:40 PM Apr 18th
• It amazed me how many still hadn't heard of the #WestonAPrice Foundation & I had a blast telling them all about how THEY rocked MY world. 3:36 PM Apr 18th
• Today was a lot more fun! People were MUCH more willing to chat & I think I rocked one vegan's world, but I tried to rock gently. 3:32 PM Apr 18th – For some reason Saturday felt like a dud to me.  A lot of people had that dazed, “overloaded” look on their face, and most didn’t seem to be into Real Food yet.  (There were many many boxes and bags and packets of gluten-free food around for people to sample.)  But Sunday something was different.  I spoke to many people who had never heard of Weston Price or about how butter is good for you, it was fun!  I felt like that was where I was supposed to be.  One young couple walked up and I felt bad for them because I could tell the wife wasn’t feeling well.  Obviously there’s a lot more going on than just this, but as a starting point I asked, “Do you eat butter?” She said, “I think it’s called Country Crock.”  I said, “Can I get you to consider going home and throwing that away and only using real butter from now on?”  They were open and curious and we went on to talk about comparing the ingredients of butter vs. Country Crock, we also talked about cod liver oil, coconut oil, raw dairy, pastured meats, homemade bone broths and other foods that can help her finally feel better.
• Olive is here from the local #westonaprice chapter, she also has GREAT information for attendees-the BIGGER picture beyond just gluten-free: www.theglutensyndrome.net. 11:42 AM Apr 17th
• Met Kathy Pirtle, author of Performance without Pain: A Step-by-Step Nutritional Program for Healing Pain, Inflammation and Chronic Ailments in Musicians, Athletes, Dancers. . . and Everyone Else. I’m bummed that I was at our tables and missed her talk, “Healing beyond a gluten-free diet.” 🙁 11:41 AM Apr 17th

  Kathy was at the Weston A. Price Foundation table next to me and her pitch to all the gluten-free expo attendees was brilliant and drew them in:  “I almost died 8 years ago from Celiac Disease even though I was on a gluten-free diet.”  She and Olive (see above) were both from the local WAP chapter and they taught a lot of people about healing BEYOND just going gluten-free.  If you go to her website, Performance Without Pain, you’ll get a treat while you search through her nutrition information.  She’s a musician with amazing talent and her music will start to play while you’re on her site.  It took me 40 years, but now I absolutely love classical music, or a lot of it anyway.  I love how it makes me feel, and it’s not easy to explain what I mean without sounding dorky.  If you know what I mean and can put it into words, please comment.  🙂

• So many neat people to talk to here at the gluten-free cooking expo! Wearing my @USWellnessMeats fleece and “Butter was Framed” t-shirt! 11:39 AM Apr 17th
• 4 yr old has Red Wings shirt on on Blackhawk country!!! 7:43 PM Apr 16th
• We're back in. I love fire fighters-one let our 4yo see his mask. Now we're in bar w/ kids playing Wii on big screen. 7:01 PM Apr 16th – Our 4 year old LOVES fire fighters and fire trucks.  Earlier in the day we went to visit a fire station in downtown Chicago, his favorite part of the trip was when a nice fireman let him sit in the truck and slide part-way down the pole!  Our fire fighters here in town are awesome (and let him sit in the trucks every time we go down there), but they don’t have a fire pole.  This was huge.  🙂
• Hotel evacuated for fire, we're outside watching fire trucks. Lungs hurt from running up 7 flights to make sure kids were out. 6:46 PM Apr 16th – Just in case our daughter’s teacher is reading (who thankfully is a friend of mine), yes, Kent & I were in the bar when the fire alarm went off (as she shared with the class today), but it was just for one quick drink and our almost 18 year old was up in the room with the kids.  Just thought I’d clarify that.  I was getting 911 flashbacks as I was flying up the steps and a whole swarm of people were going down the steps to get out.  Someone asked where I was going and all I could get out was, “My kids are up there.”  I don’t know why I worried, turns out Kal calmly told the kids to get on their shoes and they went to check out the cool fire trucks.  I figured Kal would have it covered (he’s an amazing kid) but still had to make sure, so once I found the empty room I ran back down the 7 flights and joined everyone out in the parking lot.  (You’ll be proud to know that I wasn’t even tempted to grab my computer while I was there…although it did cross my mind for a brief moment.)  Thankfully it was a gorgeous day and we hadn’t gone down to the pool yet.  (It was beautiful out but too chilly to hang around outside in swim suits.)  Where was Kent you ask?  He figured I was over-reacting and finished his beer!  He heard something about construction on the loudspeaker and assumed a fire alarm got tripped, similar to what happens on his jobs all the time (he’s a project manager for a commercial construction company).  When the kids & I were chatting with the firemen, though, they said there had been smoke on the 4th floor and they didn’t know from where.  Comforting, eh?  No wonder I didn’t sleep good that night.
• A HUGE jet just went SCREAMING overhead, I loooooove jets!!! Kent doesn't much like me to scream while he's driving in Chicago though. 5:32 PM Apr 16th – I have a nasty habit of freaking when jets go over.  Don’t ask me why, I just love it when big ones go right over my head.  Yes, I know I’m odd.
• What was THAT disgusting pic now? Has anyone else had Twitpic issues?! 1:27 PM Apr 16th – So I gave up on the pictures, and after the Lego store, our 8 year old daughter and I went to the American Girl Doll store and get this:  I got us out of there for only $16 buckaroos!  She has “Kit” so we got the Kit movie – yay for Kit movies!  (Besides that she has a couple of the miniature dolls that she likes to play with, and her full sized doll is a Proverbs 31 doll.)
• Trying the Lego pic AGAIN. https://twitpic.com/1g1gbc 1:25 PM Apr 16th

   

   

• I'm having trouble & don't know what Twit pic is doing!!! 1:21 PM Apr 16th
• Guess where we are? Can you tell this is made of Legos? https://twitpic.com/1g1ddb 1:12 PM Apr 16th
• Mannys https://twitpic.com/1g104c 12:18 PM Apr 16th – This one worked…just to make me think the other time was a fluke, so then I did the above tweet and got something even more disgusting.
• I have no idea where that last tweet pic came from, I didn't take it! I think twitpic messed up?! 12:15 PM Apr 16th
• Pic of Mannys – they have tongue & liver, but I got the yummy fish. 🙂 ($70 lunch-ouch.) https://twitpic.com/1g0xr8 12:09 PM Apr 16th – This was my first time trying Twitpic, now look at what picture actually got tweeted by Twitpic, I have no idea what it is and I’d never seen that picture before!  (The one I meant to tweet is of Kent and the kids walking into Manny’s.)
• We're outta here! Takes 3 1/2 hrs from GR to Chicago. We've got coffee & are in our happy place. 8:44 AM Apr 16th – We love how quickly we can buzz around the Big Lake to get to Chicago.  If the weather is nice, our favorite thing is to just walk around the city and do a little of this or that, rather than drop the big bucks on a museum or other expensive admission tickets until all the kids are older.  (Kal already did the Museum of Science and Industry, Shedd’s Aquariaum, and went up to the top of the Sears Tower a few years ago.)

  NOTE:  Tweets will be in italics, and my extra notes are in regular font…