On November 16th, 2007, I gave birth to our beautiful daughter Emily. My husband and I decided that it would be best if I breastfed, at least for the first month or so. Once I was back to work we would play it by ear as my job usually involved a fair amount of travel. Emily was supplemented through the night with 10cc's of formula twice - once each night that I was in the hospital. We never thought anything of it until much later.
Emily is our first child, so we had a lot to learn. She was an incredibly happy baby, right from the start. She slept well, ate well, but got really fussy in the evenings. The fussiness got more frequent and involved a lot of gas, but we still didn't think much of it. We talked about it with our pediatrician, but Emily was gaining weight, so they didn't think there was anything to worry about. The only thing we could think of was for me to start a food diary.
On January 23rd, 2008 (yes, I remember the day clearly), we decided to try supplementing Emily with a bit of formula. She had been taking pumped breast milk from a bottle for a couple of weeks, but we wanted to try to mix in some formula to give my aching breasts a bit of a break. Within minutes of giving her about 2 oz, she broke out in hives from head to toe, was red as a lobster and her ears started to swell. I have an allergy to an antibiotic where I get the same reaction, followed by my throat starting to close. I started to freak out and told my husband that we had to get her to the hospital fast. The hospital was only 10 minutes away and they took us in pretty quickly. Emily was a trooper through the ordeal. She just sat on my lap and sucked her thumb while they have her some benadryl and kept an eye on her for a few hours. The benadryl worked, her swelling and redness went down and the hives slowly started to fade.
The next day we had a follow-up appointment with our pediatrician. She thought Emily might be allergic to one of the ingredients of the formula (probably milk or soy), so she sent us for some blood work. To make a long story short (and so I don't have to relive the pain she went through), it took 2 blood test and over 5 weeks to find out that everything came back normal. In the meantime, I decided to take diary and soy out of my diet to see if it helped. The difference was incredible! Don't get me wrong, Emily still gets gas - she's just not clenched up in pain and crying for hours in the evenings anymore! Now the hard part was for me - how was someone who LOVES dairy going to cut it out of her life completely? Soy, I doubt that'll be a problem. Boy was I wrong! The dairy was quite easy to remove - soy on the other hand, who knew it was in EVERYTHING???
So, it's been over 7 months. We've become experts at reading labels, tried lots of products, and lots of recipes. I'm hoping to share as many as I can remember with you starting with some of our favorites.
