Cooking marathon, epsom salt baths, and dripping goat yogurt

OK, so I haven't posted in WAY too long. I was waiting, you see. I wanted to regale you with tales of yogurt making, but I don't have my pictures ready yet. I apologize.

This weekend, though, of course I had another cooking marathon. It was mostly fun, and Saturday was spent making a whole bunch of chicken soup, along with two big pans of chicken breasts. I then threw in a Pyrex dish full of pineapple, and I cooked that for two hours. An hour in, I tossed in six 1/3 pound ground sirloin patties from Costco. While all of that was going on, I boiled a big pot of carrots. On Sunday I made two batches of egg bread so Clark would be set for school, too.

So I was pretty set on meats for the week.

I also made a double batch of ketchup, and ruined the mayo yet again. But reader Kim chimed in and told me that I need to COOL it before adding it to the blender. Perhaps I will stop having so many problems if I do that. Meh. Thanks for the tip, Kim!

So, the yogurt was a success, even though I fretted over it for 24 hours. I will post the process once I have the photos. I chilled it, put it in the fridge, and tasted it.

OK, so I wasn't exactly thrilled. It tasted like cottage cheese and lemon juice, except not as good. I put some honey on it but I didn't much like that. Strangely, I liked mixing it with ketchup better.

So I went ahead and started with 1/4 tsp. Then I went to 1/2. When I hit 1 tsp, I got really irritable so I figured it was working. I decided to drip the yogurt for better tolerance, so I grabbed a small glass jar, a plastic funnel, and a coffee filter. I put the filter in the funnel, stuck it over the jar, and poured some of the yogurt in. Now I'm using the dripped stuff and increasing again and I'm OK.

Since it didn't kill me, I figured I could try it out with Clark. I gave him 1/8 tsp. He woke up at 2:30 a.m. and didn't go back to sleep, but I didn't immediately tie it with the yogurt. The next day, same amount, and the same thing happened. He was also stimming like CRAZY. It was insanity. The humming, the rocking, the crawling, the head shaking...it was almost too much to deal with. But I was pretty sure it was die-off that he was experiencing, not a reaction to the yogurt, so I was determined to persevere somehow. At least he liked it. He keeps asking for more.

Today I decided I would give him a break from the yogurt and we ran an epsom salt bath for him. We just put 2 cups of salts in a bath and let him soak in it for about 20 minutes.

Then we got him ready for bed. Right before we were going to read his bedtime story, he said to me, very seriously, "The water made me feel better."

My mouth physically dropped open. I said, "It did?"

He looked at me seriously. "Yeah."

So...cool. He went to sleep and seemed MUCH more calm, so I am hoping for the best right now.