Testing Rice

Baby E seems to be feeling better today. Her smile reaches her eyes for the first time in several days. Yesterday she would smile, but they were mostly very small smiles and her eyes still looked sad.

She had no rice yesterday. I need to know if that's the difference, so I'm giving her some rice right now. We'll see what happens.

If there's something going on that's more than food-related, I hope we'll figure it out soon.

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I did give her some of the specially-compounded allergen-free Tylenol yesterday, and she was fine with it. It did seem to help a bit. Maybe her milder fussiness yesterday was related to teething.

Yesterday afternoon my dad took the older girls to see a movie about dolphins, and then out to eat. They had such a fabulous time. The girls really love being with Grandpa.

While they were gone I was able to take Baby E to get her blood draw for the celiac panel.

We also went to the butcher shop to get some meat. With Baby E's apparent tendencies to develop new allergies if she eats a food too often, I thought some variety in the meat we were eating was a good idea. I got a whole free-range organic chicken, figuring even a whole chicken was more variety than nothing but frozen chicken thighs all the time. I'll cook it up and make a broth with the bones, to hopefully get a little more calcium into us.

Then I bought some ground veal and buffalo, and some uncured additive-free bacon. I wanted to get some venison, but apparently you have to order that in advance and buy an entire case of it.

I must admit that I've hardly eaten anything the last few days. With Baby E developing new allergies and not being sure what she was reacting to, I was afraid to eat anything for fear it would get into my milk and make her sick. I'm down to 102 lbs. and starting to look gaunt even to myself, so I really can't keep doing that.

Last night I decided that I'm going to have to go ahead and try eating gluten for now. If it seems to affect her badly I'll cut it out again, but she's getting it in her diet anyway and at the moment that doesn't seem to be what's causing the acute episodes.

I made a delicious stir-fry with the ground veal, some garlic and leeks, carrots, celery, zucchini and kale. It tasted so wonderful. I ate so much of it I gave myself a stomachache.

Baby E ate some of the stir-fry, too, but once a peach appeared as a possibility that was all she wanted. Peaches and grapes are her current favorite foods.