A Reminder For When Everything is Going Well

I don't want to forget this incident, so I'll tell you about it.  A few months ago, I bought a box of my favorite Belgian chocolates, and then saved them on top of the microwave, for a dessert on the weekends to share with my husband.  After a few weeks of assuming my husband was sneaking them now and then, the box was empty, which was not something my husband would do.  I shared this with my husband and we sat down with our 5 year old who does not have LPLD, to have a heart-to-heart about stealing.

She look confused, and denied knowing what we were talking about.  I was surprised - she's not a great liar, thank goodness.  And in the meantime, her big sister had run out of the room and was crying.

Finally it dawned on us, and we asked Monica if she had eaten the chocolates.  She admitted to it.  And this shattered our world.  Monica has LPLD and knows it.  And knows the consequences of eating fat.  And knows that chocolate is one of the big no-nos of our house for her.  Especially in large quantities!  And she is so trustworthy and honest and responsible with her LPLD!  And here, a whole box of chocolates was totally gone!  Did we need to take her to the clinic?  Have her triglycerides drawn?  Freak out about the chance that she was going to get really sick from this???????

A statue of Anne Frank in Amsterdam.  A little girl who did hard things.

Obviously, freaking out wasn't the solution.  And really, she'd been sneaking chocolates for so long now, if she wasn't having stomach pains already, it was likely she wasn't going to go into pancreatitis.  Thank God!  But wow, what a surprise!  We should have been expecting this eventually, but surely not until some more rebellious pre-teen years!

But Monica didn't eat the chocolate to be rebellious.  She ate them because they were delicious and easy to get to.  Poor thing, chocolate is indeed amazing.  When it came down to it, we talked for a long time while hugging and rocking Monica, and lamenting what a burden LPLD is and how we wish we could give her all the chocolate in the world.  In heaven, I am sure she will eat chocolate non-stop.  But for now, we will try to help her avoid temptation and keep things like that out of sight and out of reach.  And she will try to trust us to tell us when something is just too tempting.  We can make temptations go away.

So if you ever wonder why we don't keep Oreos on hand, for our middle daughter, or for us, this is why.  Why snack bags of chips, or even big bags clipped shut, will never be acceptable in our house, this is why.  My LPLD girls have enough struggles, the last thing I need to do is foolishly tempt them myself.  We're certainly not a fat free house, but we're also not a mindless-snacking-on-fat house, either.

Flowers are fat free!!

There was a tiny part of me that was disappointed that she didn't get pancreatitis from such a large amount of chocolate - that would really teach her!  Ugh, what an ugly thought.  And a bigger spark dwells in my heart, that maybe as an adult she'll be able to eat more chocolate than we think right now.  That maybe she'll get comfortable enough with blood draws to do a few tests of eating different strengths of dark chocolate and see how her triglyceride levels respond.  Maybe I'll sit on the couch one day with my eldest daughter and share a small box of Belgian chocolates.

At least I can dream.