Just a crumb

Today the girls and I had to run an urgent errand right at lunch time, so I bought the two older ones each a corndog at the grocery store deli. I let AJ and M&M sit in the back of the cart and eat while Baby E sat in front and I pushed the cart.

Everything was going along quite happily when M&M said, "I'm done, Mommy . . . hewe's my stick." I asked her to wait a moment until we could find a trash can.

A few minutes later I suddenly realized that Baby E was holding a corndog stick. Since corn seems to bother her when she eats it, I grabbed it away as quickly as I could--just as she was reaching to put it in her mouth.

M&M said, "I didn't realize it was Baby E, Mommy. A hand reached back to take the stick and I thought it was you."

By the time we got home, Baby E was miserable.

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At first I thought she was just tired and put her down for a nap. She fell asleep in my arms, but when she woke up some time later she was inconsolable. She cried and squirmed if I held her and cried even harder when I put her down. She screamed when I tried to feed her, and even trying to distract her with something interesting didn't help much. Nothing I did worked; she just flailed around and cried.

It was almost to the point that I was getting ready to call the doctor because it seemed so severe and went on for so long with no apparent reason.

I thought, "Wow, this is almost like she's had soy, but I know I haven't eaten anything with soy in it. I wonder what could be bothering her, or if she's sick?" Then it hit me. She must have managed to lick the corndog stick, probably ingesting minute amounts of soy along with the corn.

She's still not feeling well tonight, but she is better. It seems the reaction is longer-lasting and possibly (as I would expect) more severe when she actually ingests soy directly as opposed to when she gets it through my milk. E can't have gotten more than a crumb or two--M&M had eaten every bit of corndog she could get off the stick.

I'm really glad she didn't have a worse reaction than she did. I sure wouldn't want to see what would happen if she had more than a crumb of something with soy in it.

Last time she had a reaction we finally found out that the seasoning on the meat I'd eaten had MSG and soy as the last ingredients, and she had a pretty bad reaction to that even getting trace amounts in my milk. Most people who are allergic to soy don't react to the oil, so either her allergy is at even more of an unusual extreme than we had expected, or MSG (which can be soy-derived, also) was the problem that time.

As she gets older, it's harder to completely control everything that goes into her mouth. I'm wondering if we need to become a completely soy-free household rather than just buying the more expensive soy-free products for myself and Baby E to eat. At the moment, I don't let her down on the kitchen floor much, partly because I'm worried she might get a soy-containing bread crumb or something like that from something the older girls or DH ate.

On a somewhat related note, she has gotten quite a bit slimmer since she started crawling, and doesn't seem to be gaining weight at all, even though she's definitely growing. Last week the doctor said she's now at the 50th percentile for weight, down from 75th percentile at her last appointment and after being 98th percentile for most of her infancy.

I worry that it's because she's not eating enough. Since we're trying to introduce new foods systematically and cautiously to watch for allergies, and since we have detected apparent problems with several foods, her selection of foods is limited.

She's become quite picky about flavor, texture and types of foods, and also seems to crave variety. She'll eat something about 1 1/2 times before she's tired of it and wants something else, but there are so few things she can eat that I'm having trouble coming up with foods she doesn't refuse.

I think she's getting a bit tired of chicken and rice by this point, and just picks at them. She has recently refused to eat broccoli, sweet potatoes, applesauce, squash, blueberries and carrots, along with a number of other foods she once ate happily. Other things, like beef, green beans, millet and peas, she has never wanted to eat. The only thing she's been willing to eat with any great consistency or quantity the last few days is pears.

I don't know if it's just that she hasn't been feeling well and that's affecting her appetite, or what, but it's a bit disconcerting. I'm trying to come up with some new ideas for relatively hypoallergenic foods to try.