Got Milk?

A few weeks back when we had Julie's blood drawn during her three-year checkup, the doctor ran some tests to check on the state of her allergies. We have, after all, been meticulous about keeping her away from her allergens in the hopes that she will eventually outgrow some or even all of them. The news came back potentially good - the RAST tests were all negative, although these tests are known to be less than perfectly accurate. So then we went back to the allergist last week to discuss our options and had another round of skin-prick tests. The wheat and soy, which had previously come back negative, despite Julie's obvious reactions to them, came back positive. However, the eggs and dairy came back negative. What does all this testing mean? The allergist suggested that we slowly try reintroducing dairy and eggs in Julie's diet to see what happens.

When you're dealing with food allergies, it's usually the protiens that cause the reaction from your immune system. Sometimes, cooking foods breaks down or denatures some of the protiens, which can make them less allergenic (but not always, and not for everybody). It took me a few days to work up the nerve to go ahead and cook something for Julie to try. After all, we've been working hard for the last year and a half NOT to expose her to this stuff, doing our best to avoid the scream-filled nights and cranky-pants days that made up the first year and a half of her life.

Finally, I made some soup with butter in the roux instead of the olive oil I normally use. She ate it and slept just fine. Woke up the next day and everything was normal. Thoughts of real butter cookies for this Christmas started floating around in my head. I have to admit that I started actually hoping it might be true. Last night, I took another small step forward. I made chicken pot pie with milk cooked in the sauce. Still no problem, as far as I can tell. Visions of real cream sauces and puddings started filling my head.

We're not out of the woods for milk yet. I need to keep feeding her cooked milk for another week or so and see if there's any cumulative change, then maybe we'll try some yogurt or cheese. I think I'm going to hold back on giving her plain uncooked milk any time soon - she does fine with rice milk. But being able to eat things containing dairy opens up a multitude of possibilities! I've been wanting to feed her kefir for the probiotics, and many of the gluten-free products contain dairy, but now we'll be able to consider using them. There's a gluten-free bakery in town, and maybe now we'll actually be able to patronize it. Maybe next month we'll be ready to try some eggs, and that could open up even more possibilities.

It's all very exciting, and I'm trying to rein in my hopes a bit just in case we start to see some kind of reaction. Meanwhile, here's what the little imp got up to this morning while I was nursing Sophie in the other room. I should have had the kitchen gate closed but didn't, and she wanted to play with one of the craft kits I had left on top of the fridge. The kid started trying to stack the kitchen stools and was about to start climbing up them when I caught her.



To keep things balanced, here's a picture of Sophie and me on the swing at the park a couple of days ago.



I'm off to bed. I'll have some knitting content tomorrow!