Oh What a Night!

We have certainly had a lot of them since my last update on Ellie, and we certainly have had very little sleep since then as well. At the end of December I had great hope that this year would be relatively uneventful compared to 2010, and so far January of 2011 has brought in the New Year with a definite bang. Elianna did so great with her previous food trials, but the looming factor has been this nasty corn. Corn is in everything, if you did not already know that. And Elianna's huge love for paper products as a dessert has not been helpful. Fails in the past that we can now attribute to corn include the following: disposable diapers, cardboard boxes, adhesives, board books, infant Tylenol, bath soaps and shampoos, just to list a few. Oh yes, skin is the largest organ and it absorbs like nobodies business. If you ever doubted that and the effect of things put on your skin, all you need to do is watch an FPIES child do atopic patch testing and scream for two days, or give them a bath from the head down with organic baby shampoo complete with wheat protein (been there, done that).

In addition to the corn, Ellie has enjoyed a diet of hair and fuzzies. This has led us to investigate a disorder called Pica, but since she is not ingesting amounts that are harmful I can not put too much energy into another diagnosis for a child who is 18 months old and has only a handful of pit fruits that she can eat. Having food issues does seem logical, regardless of the additional problems. The doc mentioned sending her to Occupational and Speech Therapy for Food Therapy but since we really don't have anything to feed her that seems like a pointless expense right now. She is doing fine spooning herself ice chips and puree that we give her, so the texture issues will have to be resolved with time.

At the end of 2010 we were very excited to exhaust the Plum (Prunus) botanical food family by calling safe apricot, peach, nectarine, plums of all kinds, cherry, and homemade almond milk. These results became a little muddied the first week in January when she began to have symptoms of a fail, until we traced it back to a baby wash we had used on her a handful of times that contained wheat protein. This seems to have begun a January list of fails that are becoming exhausting. And I don't find it coincidental that ever since we stopped diluting her corn based formula with almond milk and returned to just formula, she has not appeared to be completely 100%. One of the many things I have (re)learned with the help of FPIES: no such thing as a coincidence.