Happy Baby

Baby E woke up around 1 a.m. last night and was acting like she really wanted to nurse but wouldn't. After an hour of fussiness and restlessness, I finally went out on a limb and persuaded her to try nursing.

After that she seemed quite contented. She made her "want" sign toward her crib, and actually chuckled with pleasure when I went to put her to bed again. She happily laid down and went to sleep. She slept soundly until 9 a.m. and woke up happy.

Today she was obviously feeling great.

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She was cheery and social, happily going to other people for long periods of time (which is unusual for her). She napped well even though her schedule was a bit thrown off by church.

There were a number of situations where she normally would have thrown a huge long-lasting tantrum, and didn't. To my surprise she protested little or not at all, took it in stride and went happily on to something else.

She was just so extremely happy all day. Almost every time I looked at her she was smiling, giggling and interactive. None of that almost-blank stare and deadpan face she gets when she's feeling ill and tired.

If I had to eat nothing but chicken, brown rice, broccoli, pears and bananas for the next year it would be so worth it to have her feeling this well.

We're not really starting to get tired of the diet, either. There are really a lot of ways you can prepare and combine just a handful of foods; I haven't even come close to trying all my ideas yet.

It was exciting, though, to see that she seemed to do well with introducing butternut squash today. She ate a fair-sized serving and there's no sign that it's bothering her yet. I'll eat some tomorrow or the next day if she seems to have no ill-effects from it.

I plan to introduce apples in a couple of days if she continues to do well with the squash, and then lamb and probably at least one other vegetable. All those things are foods I'm pretty certain she tolerates well. If there are no problems my current plan is to move fairly quickly introducing those next few foods, probably 2-3 days apart instead of the 4-7 days we'll allow for other foods.

Then we'll probably start introducing some gluten-containing grains.

I was going to wait as long as possible before introducing gluten again, since both she and I are feeling so well without it. But that raises a problem; in order for any celiac tests to have a chance of being accurate, the patient has to be consuming lots of gluten for a long time before the test.

Celiac is a generally slow-acting autoimmune disorder, very different from a food allergy or intolerance. It can take months or years of exposure to gluten before it really starts doing measurable damage, and the body starts healing itself very quickly after gluten is removed from the system.

Even a week off gluten just before the test can cause a false negative. Ideally the person needs to be consuming at least the equivalent of 1-2 slices of wheat bread per day for 6 months or more before the test. The very minimum amount of time a person needs to be consuming lots of gluten before the test seems to be at least 6 weeks from what I've been reading. Even then, you can still get a false negative with a blood test and biopsy if the case isn't severe.

I'm not going to worry about that, though. If she seems to be doing well on grains like oats, barley and wheat after eating them again for a few weeks and she tests negative, I'll consider that we've ruled out celiac.

Hopefully she'll be fine with the gluten grains, and we'll end up coming to the conclusion that her recent reaction was just a cross-contamination issue with the Terra chips. It's quite possible that it was just a cross-contamination issue and that she's not actually allergic to sweet potatoes at all. We can hope, right?

Either way, I'm enjoying having such a happy baby right now.