Food Allergies

It’s been so long since I’ve posted, I almost feel like ignoring that fact and just jumping in and doing this post.  So that’s what I’m going to do.

We’ve been trying to figure out what to do with sweet little Camren around here.  He had a reaction to a milk based formula when he was about 4 months old.  It was hard to know what to make of that since he has mostly been breast-fed from birth.  He rarely had any reason to take a bottle of formula.  So when I began to introduce cereal to him, I used a soy based formula to mix with it.  He didn’t seem to have any issues with that.  But when he was about 11 months old, he had a pretty serious reaction to a tiny bit of scrambled eggs.

After meeting with the pediatrician, we were sent for a blood test and to an allergist.  The results showed numbers for eggs, milk, peanuts, soy and wheat.  I was baffled since he had been eating soy and wheat without any issues.  After meeting with the allergist, our plan is to strictly avoid eggs, milk and nuts.  This has prompted me to read labels on everything.  I was never too concerned about ingredients before all of this.  I hate to admit that in the short time since getting the information about his food allergies, I haven’t exactly risen to the challenge.  Perhaps I’ve been disappointed or just plain angry about it.  But I now see that this is not going to be so bad.  I will learn all about substitutions and new recipes to try for Camren.  I will teach Quin what he can and cannot share with his brother.  I will continue to love the little guy and keep him well fed.  Of course this brings a few new challenges but I am praying that he will one day outgrow the reactions he’s had.  In the meantime, I am reminding myself that there are far worse things to deal with – food allergies are pretty low on the scale of difficulties.  I am grateful that God has given me a beautiful, sweet boy to care for and feed, and a big brother to help out.

I’ll be trying some baking in the next week with an egg replacement product.  I’ll post recipes here once I am confident of sharing them.