the curious case of benjamin button bread

I've come to appreciate the beauty of freshly baked homemade bread. I'm still trying to appreciate the taste of my own freshly baked homemade bread.

If you've talked to me anytime in the last couple of months, you will know that one of my new goals is to get our family's year's supply of food together. After a fantastic class on emergency preparedness by Karen Wilkinson (http://kneadfulthingsnow.com - check it out. She's awesome!), I realized that now is the time for us to get ready (hurricane season is just around the corner). Anyway, in the spirit of food storage I decided to attempt to make bread from scratch. Whole wheat bread. 100% whole wheat bread. Mom warned me halfway through the rising time (after I had already invested about 13 cups of whole wheat flour and lots of other things!) that this was a terrible idea - to try to make bread for the first time and use only whole wheat flour. She was right...
I'm not sure why all pictures of Michael seem to showcase him sans shirt, but if you look closely you can see the pan of bread behind Meeshell on the left and on his right, in front of the toaster, you can see half of the dough that didn't make it. The two pans that did make it into the oven seemed to do ok (didn't rise very much, but Michael just commented on how efficient this type of bread was: take only two bites and you just had the equivalent of three slices of regular bread. It was pretty heavy). I really thought they were done when I took them out of the oven. But as the days went by, it almost seemed that the bread was un-baking itself. As in, it seemed done when I took it out of the oven and in the first few times that we sliced and ate it, but two days later, the bread seemd to be getting a bit doughy. Very strange. I'm really not kidding here. Michael said the same thing. He even stopped eating it today. Unfortunately, we threw this magical bread out today, and I'll have to try it again. Perhaps I'll mix in a bit of white flour to shake things up next time.