Esther Sparhawk

I was surprised to receive a call from SC Johnson medical on a Sunday. This was her answer: "The Scrubbing Bubbles Shower Cleaner is not formulated to contain gluten". The number she called from was in Minneapolis--952-486-7480.

What do you suppose "not formulated to contain gluten" actually means? After all, I'm making choices for my child, not myself. If they can't guarantee that it's completely free of gluten--cross-contaimination included--then I'm not going to use it. It's disappointing, but I must do what's right for my child, not what's easiest for me.

But jerseyangel, you are an ANGEL indeed, for trying your best. Thanks for your effort. Working moms have a tough time calling those -800 numbers. Your friends and family must treasure you for your kindness!

Oh thanks a bunch! I work at a public school, and we're not allowed to have our cell phones on during school hours. Since I'm out west, and most of the 800 numbers are for companies back east, they're always closed by the time I get off work. On my days off, I make lots of phone calls, but in the mean time, I rely on this forum and local celiacs to help me out.

Thanks for doing the footwork! I'll look forward to hearing your response.

Mechelle

Hi,

I made a phone call to SC Johnson's---hoping to get an answer for you. 1-800-494-4855.

I spoke to a customer service rep. who was able to give me the ingredients, which are--bleach alternative, citric acid, detergent cleansers and fragrance.

I was then forwared to their Medical Safety Dept. and spoke with Mary. She will be checking with their chemists and will get back to me by phone.

When I hear, I will let you know

Hopefully someone else will have some firsthand information for you in the mean time.

My child has celiac disease. We got one of those sprayer shower-cleaners with the "Scrubbing Bubbles" brand cleansers. For about ten days after we bought the Scrubbing Bubbles product, my daughter was sick, with a celiac reaction -- yellow diarrhea, upset stomach, skin problems. But I don't know if it was due to the introduction of the shower cleaner, or if it was something else.

You see, she started kindergarten at the same time. Any number of things could've caused a reaction. She's very sensitive.

And yes, I understand that all the medical experts say, a celiac must ingest a product in order to have a gluten reaction, but we're talking about a small child here. Her little fingers are in her mouth constantly, so I have to watch out for crayons, lotions, sunscreen--you name it. And besides, she gets bath water in her mouth all the time.

I've emailed the Scrubbing Bubbles company twice now, and they never reply. Has anyone ever had any success in contacting them? I'd love to be able to use my shower cleaner; I just can't take any chances until I've confirmed that the product is safe.

Thanks everyone. I'm going to try to locate some of these dealers, compare prices, and order something.

LM, I usually try to search first, but sometimes my search doesn't result in anything useful. That's when I give up and add to the thousands of other discussions. You know how it is...

I'm baking a birthday cake for my daughter's birthday, and I need black icing. In the rural area where I live, I can't find food coloring that color. But a local party store carries pre-made, packaged icing from a company called Wilton. The ingredients say: sugar, corn syrup, water, cornstarch-modified, carrageenan, salt, citric acid, sodium benzoate, artificial color, FD&C red #40, FD& C blue #1, FD&C yellow #5.

The only thing I can see that's questionable, is the modified corn starch. And to my understanding, they're required to list wheat, if it's in the modified corn starch, right?

I'd appreciate advice from anyone. Thanks.

As we all know, gluten-free bread dough is gooey stuff. So I want to buy some pans in the shapes of hamburger buns, hot dog buns, and doughnuts. Who sells these? Does anyone know a web site?

Does anyone know if finger paints are safe. And if not are there any that are?

Thanks

Elmer's (the glue company) has a lot of gluten-free products, but their finger paints are definitely not gluten-free. I recently contacted them, so I can tell you for sure, their finger paints are not gluten-free. I believe these finger paints are sold under a brand name called, "Ross", but they're actually manufactured by Elmer's.

On the flip side, because of my daughter's gluten-free status, my day care used to do something neat for finger paints. They mixed gluten-free acrylic paint with gluten-free foam shaving cream, to create a foamy finger paint. I can't remember which acrylic paint they were using, but it might have been Crayola. You can probably find out more on the Crayola web site. They were using Colgate shaving cream, which I believe is still gluten-free (but it wouldn't hurt to look into that too).

As with Play Dough, finger paints get under the fingernails, so even though the medical community tells us it's fine to have gluten touch the skin, with little kids, keeping fingers gluten-free is so important!

My daughter's kindergarten teacher is doing a fun reading project, where the kids read a book (I think it might be The Hungry Caterpillar or something) and eat pudding "Dirt Cups". She contacted me today to let me prepare something comparable for my gluten-free daughter.

So here's what a normal "Dirt Cup" contains:

Jell-O Pudding

crushed Oreo Cookies over the pudding

Gummy Worms on top

Cute, huh?

So what brands of Gummy Worms are trustworthy? Another celiac.com thread on Gummy Worms mentioned that some celiacs have gotten sick on Gummy Worms, and some brands of Gummy candies are coated with wheat to keep them from sticking together. Has anyone contacted a company to confirm gluten-free status of Gummy Worms? If so, which brands?

I understand Jell-O pudding is fine, but which brands of cookies can I use to substitute for Oreos? I think K-Toos wouldn't go soggy, but we can't ever find those locally. (We live in rural Idaho.) And I have to have the "Dirt Cup" by Monday. Most gluten-free cookies use rice flour, which would go soggy in the pudding, and the "Dirt Cup" needs to survive overnight. Please throw some ideas at me. Thanks.

hi i am new on hear my little boy is 2 and has celiac i am on the look out for a t shirt for him not having much look finding anything in uk also if any one could advise me on foods he is very fussy also cant hav milk gets me down as no noone with celiac who can give me hints and tips thank you joanne.xx

P.S. And here's a web site, where you can get clothes, stickers, etcetera that say "gluten-free":

Open Original Shared Link

hi i am new on hear my little boy is 2 and has celiac i am on the look out for a t shirt for him not having much look finding anything in uk also if any one could advise me on foods he is very fussy also cant hav milk gets me down as no noone with celiac who can give me hints and tips thank you joanne.xx

My daughter was 2 when we started the gluten-free diet. A year after eating gluten-free, she was finally able to digest milk, so hang in there. His lactose intolerance MAY go away w/ time. (That's not always true, but often true of celiacs.)

Can he eat eggs? If so, do you know what deviled eggs are? My daughter loves those! You hard-boil eggs, split the boiled eggs in half with a knife, extract the hard yolks, and mix the yolks with mayonnaise & salt & pepper until it's the consistency of smooth frosting/icing (some people also put mustard in their yolk mix). Then spoon the mayo-yolk mix back into the hard white portion of the egg. Be wary, mayonnaise contains soy, so if your boy is soy-intolerant, this isn't for you.

Another fun treat is rice cracker sandwiches. I lay sliced gluten-free meats and rice crackers in a decorative swirl on the plate. Then I allow my daughter to build her own "sandwiches". Sometimes making the plate look pretty gives them the impression that their food is phenomenally yummy. Presentation is everything! We call the rice cracker sandwiches "Lunchables". Naming the food can make it fun too.

When we first started the diet, I spent a lot of time at our local health food store. Don't be afraid to ask the salesperson questions. Chances are, the employees at your local health food store are already familiar with celiac disease and the gluten-free diet.

Good luck to you, and hang in there. It gets easier with time.

We are pulling Gluten from my 3 year olds diet for a trial. I am looking for a suggestion for the best flour substitute?? I make him muffins for breakfast every week and they are the only way I can get veggies in him so I don't want to loose them! What would work well?? It needs to be nut and soy free as well (food allergies).

Sarahelizabeth,

If you're just starting a gluten-free diet, one of the mistakes I made early on, was to assume that you can substitute ONE type of flour for wheat flour. I'm not trying to criticize anyone else's opinions about various flours on the market, but I think you'll find you'll need to buy or make a flour that's mixed/blended. For example, if you try to make sugar cookies using just white rice flour, your cookies turn out crisp like fortune cookies. To lighten it up, you need to mix rice flour with tapioca flour and potato starch flour, or something like that.

When you're also paying for day care and training diapers, it's most cost efficient to buy your own flours and mix them. People tried to tell me this when I started my daughter on a gluten-free diet at age 2, and I was pig headed and chose to learn this lesson the hard way, by baking a bunch of icky stuff first. If you stick to three basic flours, it's not as complicated as it might seem. Best of luck.

I've made a couple of the muffins/breads from these mixes and so far they haven't been very good. Does anyone have any suggestions on adding something to mix to make it taste better or possibly other mxes that are good? I'm trying to find other foods for my toddler and possibly sneaky ways to get healthy additives in.

Our favorite boxed mix company (for cookies, buscuits, and muffins) is 123 Gluten Free. But they're not cheap. I save these boxed mixes for holidays, birthdays, and special occassions. It's possible to order from them online, but I think you save money if you can buy from a local vendor. Their sugar cookies are our very favorite. They're scrumptious! But to give you some idea of what they cost, a box makes about four dozen cookies, but it costs us about ten bucks a box. The cool thing about them, though, is that you can cut them into holiday shapes and frost them to look like normal wheat-based sugar cookies. Once baked, they store best in the fridge. They tend to get soft and break apart in a cookie jar.

Here's their URL:

Open Original Shared Link

My daughter was given Avon Bath Time Body Paints as a gift. Does anybody know if this product is gluten-free?

I've emailed Avon, and when they respond, I'll share the info with everyone. In the mean time, it could take a while to hear back from the Avon company. Sometimes this board is quicker! Hooray for gluten-free Celiac Disease Forum!

Mechelle

Okay, they gave me the generic "can't guarantee gluten-free" thing.

I also had the same question about hand sanitizer. Bath and Body works emailed me back and gave me a list of scientific names for Wheat, rye barley oats and soy and said to check each individual product.

I actually called Purrell- because I was convinced I was glutened by it and they said that there is no gluten in their product, however there is also basically no control over the lines and thus products could contain trace amounts. I'm not sure what to think. It seems strange to me that I hand sanitizer could make you sick-but you never know!

Hey rpf1007,

I'd love to see that list of scientific names for wheat, rye, barley, and oats. Could you post that on this thread? I'm always wondering about hygiene products, because I'm not as familiar with those names for gluten.

Mechelle

We're using Cascade Complete in our dishwasher. I honestly don't know if it is gluten-free. Does anyone else know? I might have called about it years ago, when we first started the diet, but I can't remember. I would like to hear an update.

Our regular dish soap is Dawn, and I called less than six months ago to get confirmation on that one.

I don't claim to be nearly as knowledgeable as some of these other folks, but I can tell you that bipolar disorder runs in my family too, and although my daughter hasn't been diagnosed with bipolar or ADHD, I have noticed hyperactivity in her whenever she ingests sugar. It's noticeable too, not just a brief sugar high. She gets moody, over-active, and sometimes irrational on just the slightest amount of sugar.

We've had her on the celiac gluten-free diet for three years, and the reactions to sugar seem to be waning as her body becomes healthier.

I've often wondered--but again, I'm no medical expert--if the disease doesn't cause absorption problems related to sugar. Celiac disease, I'm told is in the same family of diseases as diabetes (an autoimmune disorder) after all...

My daughter was given Avon Bath Time Body Paints as a gift. Does anybody know if this product is gluten-free?

I've emailed Avon, and when they respond, I'll share the info with everyone. In the mean time, it could take a while to hear back from the Avon company. Sometimes this board is quicker! Hooray for gluten-free Celiac Disease Forum!

Mechelle

I have celiac disease and have been getting a blistery looking rash that consists of clumps of really tiny (about pin point sized) puss filled blisters (sorry to be so graphic). Also it seems to be getting better the longer I am gluten free. My doctor told me that DH usually occurs on the elbows, knees and buttock. However, my rash has occurred mainly on my feet, a little on my hands and slightly on my hips. Does anyone know if DH can show up on the feet, hands and hip? Has anyone else out there experienced this?

Thanks

My daughter was less than a year old when the p%$#@# blisters started to appear on the bottoms of her feet. They were in-between her toes, at the base of the foot, and in the little tiny joint crack where the toe meets the foot. This was one of our earliest indicators that she was a celiac (but of course, we didn't figure it out for another year). Because of the blisters under her feet--which sometimes opened into lesions--she didn't learn to walk until very late in her babyhood. It must've been physically painful for her, and it was heartbreaking for me as a mother.

Now she's five years old, and we've had her on the celiac diet since age two and a half. We fought the blisters with creams, powders, constantly exposing the feet to air... Only one thing got rid of the blisters for good: a completely gluten-free diet. She had to deal with the blisters throughout her toddler years, but once she was completely gluten free, we never, ever saw the blisters again. She now walks, runs, and plays like all the other kids, and her skin is clear and healthy.

I hope my daughter's success story has given you hope.

My daughter is four now, and she was diagnosed by diet only, at age two. Even though she's thriving wonderfully now, and the diet has made all the difference in the world, I still wish I had done the biopsy, while her bowels were still looking damaged. It's too late now. And even when she's fully grown, we'd have to put her back on a wheat diet, make her really, really sick first, and then do a biopsy to confirm her diagnosis as a celiac.

I just wish I had done the biopsy at the very beginning. That's what I can tell you through my own experience: I regret not doing a biopsy back when she was actually sick. A biopsy would have been very affirming, and I just wish I had that. Maybe it's sounds silly. I should just be glad I've got a healthy kid. But I do wish I had done that biopsy.

Mechelle

My daughter was 2 when I discovered she had celiac disease. We were in the 2nd percentile for growth. Incidentally, now, at age 4 1/2, she's in the 50th percentile-- alas, there is hope! But I can tell you that it took us from August to May, to get her diarrhea to go away. These are some of the things that I just didn't consider, when we first started her diet. It took us literally 10 months to slowly weed some of these products out of our daily routines:

• vitamins -- some are not gluten-free, some are; we now use Yummi Bears
  
• chewable pain-killers -- some are gluten-free, some are not; I only use Tylenol liquid now
  
• hand soap at home, in stores, and at daycare -- no, it's not supposed to seep through the skin, but think about all the times your two-year-old puts hands in mouth...
  
• play dough at daycare -- don't even let your child PLAY with it; washing hands after doesn't get it out from under the fingernails
  
• glue at preschool and at home -- Elmer's is probably the safest
  
• cross-contamination of counter tops, cutting boards, and the table you eat on -- don't let Dad drink out of the orange juice container anymore
  
• cross-contamination through the toaster -- buy one for your little one, seperate from the others'
  
• cross-contaimination of spreads (gluten crumbs are found in mayo jars, margine tubs, etc...)
  
• alcohol wipes -- alcohol can be a grain alcohol -- use alcohol-free and perfume-free wipes
  

I know all this sounds overwhelming at first, but YOU CAN DO IT! When you see your child finally growing and feeling healthy and sleeping well at night and running and playing like all of the other kids... ah! It's worth all the trouble you've gone to, to ensure your child's health and well-being. So keep your chin up, and give it time. A book that helped me a lot was Dana Korn's Kids with Celiac Disease.

I'm both a mom of a kid with celiac disease, and I am also on staff at a school lunchroom. So I see what kids like to eat and what's served at school. These are some of the gluten-free things I like to send in my daughter's lunchbox:

• deviled eggs w/ gluten-free mayo (they store nicely in a sushi box)
  
• gluten-free lunchables (seal one baggie with rice crackers and Glutino crackers; seal another baggie with Hormel's canadian bacon--it says gluten-free right on the label-- and cut up different kinds of cheese; you can even include a plastic knife and a little container of cream cheese for spreading)
  
• Yoplait yogurt with gluten-free granola or a gluten-free Envirokids rice crisp bar
  
• mom's home-made gluten-free trail mix
  
• holiday cut-out sandwiches (make a sandwich on your favorite gluten-free bread and use a cookie cutter to cut the sandwich into a fun holiday shape)
  
• gluten-free cottage cheese with chopped up pears mixed in the cottage cheese (use the disposable tupperware, if you don't want to lose your good stuff)
  
• Kozy Shack pudding
  
• Dole fruit cups and Dole jello fruit cups (be aware that the Dole fruit-n-yogurt cups are NOT gluten-free)
  
• peanut butter-filled celery sticks and cream cheese-filled celery sticks
  
• thermos full of home-made gluten-free soup w/ gluten-free crackers
  
• cold chicken hot wings (made 'em for dinner the night before -- now they're tasty, cold the next day)
  
• gluten-free potato chips, corn tortilla chips, Fritos, or Funyuns with a home-made gluten-free dipping sauce (experiment with gluten-free salad dressings mixed with sour cream or call ahead to find out if pre-made dips are gluten-free)
  
• a mini sandwich bag of gluten-free mixed nuts and M&M's
  
• Juicy Juice drinks
  

I hope my ideas have inspired some of you moms out there. If some of you have other nifty lunchbox ideas to add, please reply and share with the rest of us!

And I know one family who had video footage of their child, the day before the vaccine, and the day after. And the difference is truly shocking. In the first, the child appears normal, happy, and is both verbally and visually responsive to his parents. In the second, he appears SEVERELY autistic.

There's a family in my community who has similar video footage of their son's fourth birthday party, where he's perfectly normal, then one week later (after vaccination) he's clearly autistic.

It's scary that the medical community is in the dark about this. When I saw my daughter's abnormal reaction to vaccines during her baby years, our school nurse chewed me out about buying into society's fear frenzy, and she made me cry. I knew something wasn't right, and I thank God I went with my own maternal instincts and postponed vaccination until later, when we discovered she was a celiac; we didn't vaccinate until even later still when she was a healthy celiac.

Whenever I see our school nurse, I can't even look at her without thinking "you idiot"!

Aack! I'm so aggrivated. I just hate to travel with my daughter, because every single time we travel, she gets glutened!

This time we went to see my brother, who is a minister. He took us to church. I packed my daughter some gluten-free cookies for snack time, and I told the Sunday school teacher, please don't let her use anything but Crayola crayons or Elmer's glue, and don't even let her TOUCH the other kids' cookies at snack time.

When I came to pick up my daughter after Sunday school, she had played with wheat-based real playdough, then the Sunday school teacher had cleaned her up with alcohol wipes! No! No! No!

On the seven hour drive home from this vacation, Annie cried for forty-five minutes because her tummy hurt, and then once we were home, she had diarrhea and stomach cramps for 24 hours.

I hate to live life in a bubble, but how do I master the problems associated with traveling? Everywhere we go, someone glutens my kid inadverdently!

Now we're preparing for a trip to go see the in-laws. Heavy sigh... I've packed up all the food I think we'll need: gluten-free flours, mixes, sauces, dressings, snacks, cookies, etc... What are some of the useful tips you other moms and dads can give me about traveling gluten-free with kids?

Buy Dana Korn's book, Kids With Celiac Disease. It's a life saver! It helps you plan for babysitters, school, preschool, family outings, etc...

Also, keep checking in on this web site. It offers great recipes and lots of helpful tips from experienced moms and dads.

When I first started out, I bought my daughter the crappy gluten-free breads offered at the grocery and health food stores. I just didn't think it seemed possible, on my working schedule, to bake bread. You'll find, though, that buying a mixer and making your own breads at home (Gluten Free Pantry has a tasty bread mix, and it's quick) will really make bread-eating a pleasant experience for your child.

If you can join a local celiac support group in your area, you'll find that's worth your time too, more than likely.

My daughter uses Suave shampoo for kids (and conditioner too). I called them on the phone this last May, and they said that wheat would be disclosed on their labels if it can be found in any of the ingredients.

My daughter's pretty sensitive, so I think by now she would've had a reaction to Suave if there was a problem, but she hasn't. We've used it for two years now.

In my purse I carry a travel bottle of Kiss My Face liquid soap for my daughter to use in public restrooms, and we have a dispenser of that stuff in our bathroom for regular hand washing at home. I've never called the company, but other people on this celiac.com web site have recommended it. The Kiss My Face company's web site is www.kissmyface.com if you're interested. Their products are usually available at just a regular store, too, which is convenient.