Children's Books!

I came across this article the other day and loved it because I am obsessed with children's books. I've always loved children's books and have boxes and boxes in the attic from my classrooms but when I was pregnant I decided to start a new library collection for Luke.

Luke has a ton of books and he loves to read them. The funny thing is I always imagined I'd read him multiple books a day and we really have been slacking in that department. The good thing is he still loves books and "reads" them to himself multiple times a day. He opens them up (correctly- this proud reading specialist has noted his Concepts About Print) and babbles different words on each page while turning them. Then he goes to the next book. The kid loves books so it's good he has a lot. I probably have an addiction- I can't go to a store and not buy him a book!

Edited to Add: I came across this link today and wanted to save it!

Allergy Testing

After a tough few weeks avoiding eggs, wheat, and nuts while traveling across the country with a wild one year old... I almost lost my mind.

We were able to schedule an appointment with a local pediatric allergist this week and I was really happy with him. He is not a very conservative allergist, but I'm ok with that. He believes the sooner you can introduce things back in the better.  He was actually more concerned with Luke's asthma, eczema and allergies since those all go together. We decided to do the scratch test on the spot which was great. I thought he was going to make us schedule another appointment. I was so happy to have more reliable answers.

The results came back as borderline to nuts and wheat and severe to eggwhite (no surprise there). The dr suggested we reintroduce wheat but hold off on eggs, nuts, seeds until the summer. He wants to do a separate nut panel and also do a "baked egg challenge" in August. The baked egg challenge has Luke eat something that has an egg baked over 300* for over 30 minutes in it (like a cake or bread). We will take the food to the office and plan to be there for 4 hours while they monitor him. If he can tolerate the baked eggs then we can try some more vaccines that contain egg.

I feel so much better now, avoiding eggs is fine with me- I'm used to it now. I also feel relieved that I found an allergist I liked and trust.

The Crazy Allergy Mama

So we've known for awhile that Luke is severely allergic to eggs but never had a medical diagnosis to how severe. I feel like we've done a pretty good job of avoiding eggs and it hasn't been too hard once we got used to it.

We needed to do allergy testing (bloodwork) to learn how severe his allergy is because of some upcoming vaccinations that are grown in egg. Since he still is pretty wheezy, needs his inhaler a good bit and has strange reactions- we decided to test for a bunch of things.

They rank the allergies as negative, mild, moderate, and high on the scale we used. Of all the things we tested for, the only one that came back negative is milk protein so I guess that's all he will be eating!

His egg white scores were extremely high and his peanut and wheat came back as moderate. So now we have to eliminate egg whites, peanuts and wheat.

I was ok with the eggs but the eggs+nuts+wheat have made me into a crazy allergy mama. This sucks. It's so scary and I feel horrible knowing I've been feeding him wheat all this time.

I really need to get my act together so I can prepare clean meals for him and stop binging from anxiety like I tend to do. If you know an allergy mama, please give her a hug. This is so hard.

I made these Oat Pancakes this morning (Just made as directed but left out the egg) and they are pretty good. We have a birthday party today but I just packed him a lunchbox: tofu, polenta, grapes, string cheese, oat pancake, and banana. Hope he isn't too disappointed!

I need to go to the store and pick up some rice pasta and other stuff.