Signing For Food

Baby E has learned a couple of new hand signs lately--can anyone guess what these are?

A clue: one of them is her version of the sign for her favorite food--the one thing she'll almost always eat.



Baby E has been feeling more under the weather the last few days--more often in an orange level. She spends a lot of time just kind of sitting, wanting me to hold her. She seems so tired, but I'm having trouble getting her to nap.

She has been sleeping through the night most of the time, though. she goes to bed late (usually between midnight and 2am), but then she doesn't wake up until sometime between 6 and 8 to nurse, and goes back to sleep until 9 or 10.

Even when she's feeling well, she still fluctuates constantly between relatively normal BMs, piles of undigested food, and explosive watery diarrhea. I'm so glad she's still nursing and getting some nutrition that way. The last few days she's wanted to nurse every hour or more through most of the day.

The most frustrating thing is trying to get her to eat. She'll make her "food" sign and give all kind of indications that she's hungry, but then will eat none or only a bite of what I offer her.

Even just trying to figure out what I can offer her is getting more difficult. Do I give her rice, even though she doesn't want to eat it and seems to react poorly to it? How about grapes? She'll always eat grapes, but has gotten severe diarrhea after eating them the last several times I gave them to her.

But I can't just not feed her anything she seems to react to, because she seems to react to everything lately. At this point I'm not sure there's much of a real connection between what she's eating and how she feels, as long as we avoid her known allergens.

I have her urine sample all packed up and frozen, labeled and ready to go to test for candida levels. The naturopath really seems to think that may be the answer to all or most of E's issues. It's worth a try, anyway.

By the way, I did find the napkin with the two allergist's names written on it. As soon as I saw it I remembered how I ended up with Dr. D. When I called the office where the first allergist on the napkin worked, they told me he didn't have any openings but that they had a pediatric allergist (the other doctor didn't work so much with kids) and that he had an opening.

Phantom Scribbler kindly did some googling for me and noticed that there was another allergist who shares a practice with Dr. "nobody's allergic to rice" that sounds like he could be promising. I may see about interviewing him. If that doesn't work I'll probably see about getting someone at the excellent teaching hospital in the next state, where we're going for the pediatric gastroenterologist. If all else fails, I suppose we'll go back to Dr. "nobody's allergic to rice."

This morning I made some completely grainless crackers out of tapioca flour. Baby E ate a few of those along with a slice or two of pear. The older girls and I liked them, too. I'll post the recipe on Restricted Gourmet later today.

At least there is one thing she'll almost always eat. I'm going to go cook some for her now. Can you guess what it is?