One day a few weeks ago Addison ‘woke up’ to food. Her senses went nuts and she just HAD to have EVERYTHING. It became impossible to eat around her. Then she rejected purees out of hand. So table food is what she loves. And she will eat anything that doesn’t eat her first. She is so HAPPY about food, it is adorable to see. I remember Teegan was just like this, the rest of my boys were picky and did not want anything to do with food in any form until they were at least a year old. How could they be related to me?! I digress….

At first we tried to be real good about what we chose to give Addison. She has some allergies of unknown origin but at some point I decided her allergies were environmental and she would HAVE NO FOOD ALLERGIES, thankyouverymuch. So after spending weeks carefully choosing her foods from the low-allergy lists, we threw all caution to the wind and let loose. First it was the bagel stick, then it was the pasta. Pretty much after that, there were no holds barred. It wasn’t all unhealthy. She also devoured avocado, broccoli, carrot and other less junky things.

Dumb.

Dumb, dumb, dumb, dumb, dumb.

Last night Addy kept crying out and waking up hysterical. Every half hour or so. At around 11pm when Tony took her out of her crib I noticed that her face was totally jacked. She had welts and red marks EVERYWHERE. We just sort of watched her (wide awake and happy at this point) but she was incredibly itchy. I have never seen her so itchy. She was a MESS. I was afraid all the itching would result in hives so we washed her face, dosed her in Benadryl (which makes me nervous since there are NO dosing instructions for an infant on the bottle and I have to rely on good ole Dr. Sears)  and we wait.

Just like clockwork, her itching stopped, she passed out and all was well. Except me. I sat watching her, sure she would stop breathing. This might be a tad irrational but it was midnight and I was exhausted so rational thinking wasn’t on the radar anyway. Plus also I just didn’t trust the Benadryl dosing. And also my good friend’s son is seriously majorly allergic to everything and that was on my mind. And also? I was watching Boston Legal, about a child who died from a peanut allergy in his classroom because the teacher responded in over 20 seconds. TWENTY SECONDS PEOPLE! OK so Addison wasn’t reacting anaphylactically but I *had* eaten a peanut butter cup a few minutes before she awoke and who knew what my peanuty kissing might do to her?

Eventually sleep won out to irrationality and we all slept good after that. In fact Addison slept another 5 hour stretch for the second night in a row! Of course Benadryl is probably to thank but I’ll take it any way I can get it.

So now we have the exciting task of figuring out what the offending substance was. This won’t be easy since I - ahem - went shopping earlier that night and bought her an entire grocery store full of new foods to try ALL of which I had to give her RIGHT AWAY as soon as I came home. Because I’m sort of excited about food.

I could list the possibilities but that would be insane. So we decided we are starting by cutting out wheat. That’s what she eats the most of and is also what is least appropriate for her age. So we’ll start there and hope it is as simple as that.

Any other ideas or suggestions welcome!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 17th, 2007 at 10:32 am and is filed under Health, Parenting. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.