Friday, December 11, 2009

Argh....Sigh....

Life can be so frustrating and yet joyful at the same time.

On Sunday, Kip started having the same food allergy symptoms that we suffered through with Gus for 7+ months when he was an infant. It has been shocking to me how similar my two children have been so far! She even started the symptoms at exactly the same age as Gus (almost to the day!).

I was, at first, devastated. Just remembering how stressful and sad it was the first time made me want to give up this time. I thought that with it being our second time around that I would handle it better, but it's still hard.

It's hard to think that her body is suffering and her immune system is working so hard to defend her against something that it doesn't need to worry about (that's what this type of allergy essentially is: a confused immune system). It is hard for me to contemplate many more months of elimination diets and doctor visits. With Gus, we were never able to figure out what it was in my diet he was reacting to, so I modified and modified, with little success. But, he is completely fine now which is a comfort to know, and he by no means had as severe a case as he could have. There are a lot of things for us to be thankful for. Kip has started smiling and hanging out with us more. Her whole face lights up when she smiles, and it's been so much fun to watch her interact with Gus a little bit.

For now I'd really like to try and continue breastfeeding so I'm not eating dairy, soy, eggs, nuts and fish for 3 weeks. We'll see if that does anything to ease the symptoms. After that, I don't know what we'll do. The formula they suggested switching Gus to supposedly can run up to $100 a week, which does not sound good to me!

I'm praying for a good attitude, complete healing for Kip or at least for us to discover what allergy she has so that I can avoid it. I am learning to process my ever fluctuating emotions through prayer and, as always, these "light and momentary troubles" are bringing me closer to my Savior!

Life goes on...I'm off to try replacing the eggs in some of my Christmas cookies with flax seed meal. We'll see how THAT goes:)

1 comment:

Heather D said...

Amy, my mom has some egg replacer powder that she's used in her baking for Leah (Leah is allergic to eggs). The results have been great! I'm not sure if it has soy or dairy in it, but I could look into it for you...