The Saga Continues

We took Sedona to an allergist on Thursday. We won't discuss the plethora of non-evidence based advice he gave. While I was busy trying to pick my jaw up off the floor, Josh talked to him about RAST testing. We ended up deciding to redo the total IgE incase something went wrong with that and testing for allergies to: chocolate, corn, wheat, baker's yeast, strawberry, dairy, soy, almond, peanut, rice. Since she's so little, we had to go over to the lab for the blood draw and there was only one tech there (takes two plus a parent to draw from a baby), so we got to go Friday morning...joy.

Then, Friday afternoon I had the chance to talk to a pediatrician I work with about it all. She had spoken with a GI friend of hers down at Texas Children's about this specific set of symptoms and she wanted to know if I had tested for blood in my milk. Well, no, I can't see any blood and haven't had any sort of damage. She pushed more...but had I tested for it? Well, no, why would I? She wanted me to test. So we did a heme-occult on my milk. Sonofa.....there's blood in my milk. Sedona's pediatrician had discussed this too and pushed the issue, but I've never seen any blood and we didn't test for it. Apparently, ingestion of blood speeds transit time, which means her small intestine doesn't have time to digest all the lactose. The extra lactose dumps into the large intestine, where the bacteria have a field day with it. All of this started out looking just like foremilk/hindmilk imbalance (where the same thing is happening for a different reason). Then I got the head's up from a well known lactation consultant that there is research out that was done in rat pups (hey, you take what you can get) that shows this lactose overload depletes their vitamin E, which makes the intestinal lining friable. That in turn would cause some temporary food intolerances. This scenario fits really well with what we've seen. It would explain why taking the offending foods out of my diet would help her get better, but not completely healed (the vitamin E shortage would keep her from healing). This LC says she's been having her clients with this set of symptoms avoid dairy/soy and take a vitamin E supplement to replenish the baby's supply of it. It's just a theory and who knows if it's really what's going on with her, but I'm so relieved to have *something* to go on, that I'm giving it a try.

In other news.....
My two girls! We still have very very little jealousy from Sierra. The worst we've had was "put sister down and play with me" on a day when Sedona was particularly needy:


Courtesy of Sierra, a picture of Sedona in the homemade moby wrap. I LOVE this wrap. Sedona spends about 6 hours a day in it at work with me. Now she's getting to the point where she doesn't want to just be held at home, she wants to be wrapped up. If she's fussy, she will immediatly calm down and start cooing when she sees me start to tie the wrap on. She's asleep in this picture, she's likes to tuck her face under one side during naps:


Check out the crayon roll Sierra is getting for Christmas! Someone in my moms group was making these and it looked like a cool idea and a good use of fabric scraps. It was really really quick to sew up too. Way cooler than a ziploc bag for crayons ;-)




And look how big Sierra's getting! She's not even a toddler anymore, she's a little girl now! :-( Yes, she's sweeping her playhouse, she LOVES to sweep.