Welcome New Allergy Cook: The Snells

A little about our food journey...it started when my daughter was born last January. I felt from day 1 she had a MSPI (milk and soy protein intolerance) but her drs were quick to dismiss me. She was so sick for so many months :( She was diagnosed with reflux at 3mo and we were told to thicken her formula with rice cereal. This helped keep the formula down but worsened her allergy symptoms (mucusy diarrhea,eczema,bad stomach aches, off and on rashes, etc) Finally i went on my own and got some nutramigen formula which still didn't help so i went to Neocate (an elemental formula) and simply thick (an alternative to rice cereal to thicken with) and she was a happy baby again! From there we started to try foods. What a hard thing this has been!

We first did the rice cereal which was a no go :( Next I tried green beans and she liked the taste but she had a GI reaction so that was stopped as well. We then tried and failed sweet potatoes, squash, potatoes, zucchini, carrots,egg noodles and bananas. As of now she is almost 1 yr and can eat apples, pears, dairy/soy free puffs, dairy/soy free crackers, kix cereal, strawberries, grapes, neocate nutra (an elemental form of rice cereal) and can have pear, grape and apple juice. Since she has so many foods she has done poorly with it has made it very hard to find and make things she can eat. I shop a lot at whole foods and get mixes or "safe" alternative ingredients there. We have RAST testing coming up on the 26th of this month but unfortunately since that only tests for skin reactions we most likely wont have a better idea of what she is truly allergic to. Its mainly just trial and fail for us.As of now she has not had eggs or anything with egg in it nor has she had peanuts or anything of the like.

I hope that gives you a better idea of what we have been through and we are facing in the future. At this point our daughter will not be on cows milk until she is at least 2yrs so its going to be quite a challenge to find things she can have to get her the nutrients she needs to continue to grow and be healthy. Your blog gives me so much hope that I will have a bunch of different things we will be able to share with her. Right now we put her to bed and then eat dinner just because its so hard to have her watch us eat and know we cannot give her any. Before she was born I never had any idea on how hard this could be!