Better

Baby E's diahhrea has been getting better since this morning. It was just such a very large quantity of diarrhea, and the unusually large quantity of mucous last night and this morning scared me a bit.

Mucous in her stools is not unheard of for Baby E, though, and the GI specialist and pediatrician both know that it happens sometimes and don't seem too concerned about it. It just rattles me--especially the way it was last night and this morning.

I left another message for the GI specialist this morning, telling her about this episode of severe mucousy/watery diarrhea, but didn't get a return call.

Baby E's diarrhea is improving . . . becoming less frequent and more solid as the day goes on. She is urinating normally, ate a huge quantity of hamburger and brown rice for lunch, has seemed quite energetic all day, and took a nap in her "big girl" toddler bed. I'm still not sure if has a virus, or if something she ate is causing problems. It's so hard to tell with her. Nobody here has a fever or anything.

The older girls are still a bit grumpy and are complaining of being tired (which they tend to do when they don't want to do something, which at the moment is practicing handwriting), but otherwise they seem fine. Neither of them has had diarrhea at all recently, as far as I know (and upon questioning, they say they haven't).

I did want to clarify, for those who may be wondering, that we haven't been particularly limiting the older girls' diets. Usually they pretty much eat whatever they want, except that we don't allow crumbly corn foods like corn chips in the house (they can eat them elsewhere). Of course, they are somewhat limited by what we buy and cook, but we do fix foods for them that Baby E and I don't eat, and we try to accommodate special requests.

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For Baby E, we had gotten to the point where the only thing we were really limiting was corn and corn derivatives, plus a few foods that the allergist basically recommends every young allergy-prone child avoid, like nuts/peanuts and fish/shellfish. But since something (seemingly fruits) was still causing stomachaches and diarrhea, I called both the pediatrician and the GI specialist to ask what I should do.

The pediatrician (through a nurse) told me to figure it out by trial and error and limit any food that causes problems.

The GI specialist's nurse said to try cutting out all sugars for a month and then try adding things back in one at a time. She had also told me (when she told me to avoid dairy products because of the positive reducing substances test) that "sugar is sugar" and that fruit and fruit juices count as sugar, too.

Basically the GI specialist has advised us to take Baby E off dairy (with the exception of breastmilk), fruit and "all sugars" for the time being. I really didn't want to do something that restrictive if it wasn't really necessary, so I've been trying to get an answer about exactly how restrictive she wants us to be with that. I haven't gotten an answer yet.

Avoiding dairy didn't seem to make a difference, so we had added it back into E's diet until this week. I haven't given her any for the last few days. For the last few weeks, Baby E and I have been essentially rotating fruits, trying to see if one kind or another made a difference. We don't use a whole lot of added sugar in our diet anyway, for basic health reasons, so it wasn't hard to try adding sucrose (cane sugar) to a few meals to see if it made a difference.

I called the pediatrician again this week, too. He said again that we should just remove any food that causes a problem, but added that if we end up removing all fruits we will need to supplement with Vitamin C.

I'm not ready to permanently remove any food at this point. Even corn we are hoping to trial soon, to see if she's developed a tolerance for it yet.

My hope is that we can get Baby E stabilized so she's not constantly fluctuating between constipation and diarrhea, and is feeling relatively well. We need to find a baseline. Then hopefully we can start adding things from that point.

We're also looking into the possibility of getting some enzyme supplements to help Baby E to be able to digest some of the foods her body seems to have difficulty with. I'd much rather try to improve her digestion than just remove foods. Something like that may turn out to be helpful to others in the family, too.

Until the last few days, Baby E was getting tapioca-thickened water mixed with orange juice several times a day. She was also getting several servings of fruit/and/or vegetables every day.

Since rotating fruits, keeping the amounts of fruits small, and avoiding added sugars wasn't helping, I decided that maybe we should try at least a few days of avoiding fruits altogether for E and see if it made a difference. That way I could at least leave a message for the GI specialist that I'd followed her recommendation and what the results were.

Yesterday was the first day for Baby E and I of having completely no fruit--except that's not really true, because I did use a bit of lemon juice in the tapioca bread I made. (I was trying to duplicate the Chebe bread that everyone in the family loves and E eats better than any other bread-type thing, but which is rather expensive.) Honestly, we probably wouldn't have made it the whole two days with so little fruit if we hadn't been out of Baby E's orange juice--I actually went to the refrigerator to get her some yesterday morning because she was begging for it so, but it was all gone.

It was primarily the tapioca flour and the hash-brown potatoes we ate that were probably high in sulfites. E normally has tapioca flour to thicken her beverages several times a day and eats lots of potato chips, so I really didn't expect that to be a problem. I still have no idea whether the sulfites were a problem, or if her symptoms were caused by something else.

In the last couple of days I have tried to limit the older girls on added sugars (cane sugar, maple syrup, etc.), but I haven't limited them on fruit or anything else beyond my usual attempts at offering a variety of healthy foods for them to choose from. We did have a couple of days in a row where the kids happened to not eat any wheat for breakfast or lunch, so I made rice or a starchy vegetable for the grain at dinner to make it a full day of gluten-free eating. I'm not planning to continue limiting gluten at this point.

AJ is choosing to limit herself on milk for a day or two to see if it helps her feel better (she felt bad after eating dairy products a few days in a row), and M&M is currently such a picky eater/nibbler that she doesn't eat half of what she's offered anyway (we have a one-bite rule for most things, so she does at least taste them).

AJ and M&M were given candy at an event they went to tonight, so the sugar-free trial lasted all of two days--par for the course. :)

I keep thinking about doing something like the elimination diet in Is This Your Child for the whole family, but I haven't actually tried anything like that. We've had a few two- or three-day spurts of trying to remove one food, such as sugar or wheat, but it's never lasted. I think we'd need to be more motivated and organized (and probably would need a doctor advising us to make the attempt, and helping us plan it out) in order to really make any kind of elimination diet work with the rest of the family.