The Twinkies

You are my best Mommy ever.

quoth Fiona

(insert hysterical laughter here)

Yeah.

The kids have been “promoted” to the next classroom at school, which is “primary” in Montessori-speak and “preschool/kindergarten” in the rest of the world. Except that you have to be fully potty trained to move up and they aren’t. And the other 4 kids moving up at the same time are younger AND fully potty trained.

I’m not sure if I suck or those mothers are far less lazy than I am.

“I am happy at you.”

As you know, F has had a long history of GI issues. Last April we got a list of foods to avoid from some admittedly woo-woo seeming testing but but it did work and the diarrhea went away. We reintroduced the problem foods one at a time and, other than milk, everything seemed OK. Then, over the summer, her diarrhea came back and hasn’t gone away since.

I took her to the pediatrician who offered the stellar advice of “some toddlers just have runny stools” but did test for parasites (negative) and gave me a slip for a blood draw.

The blood draw was hellacious. The phlebotomist didn’t have any skill with kids or compassion and dug around in both arms trying to find a vein. It was… horrible.

We put her back, rather half-heartedly, on the elimination diet. It is very hard to eliminate all cow dairy, corn, yeast, tomatoes, eggs, mangoes and strawberries from your diet and I end up feeling like the evil harpy constantly telling people (again, because they didn’t listen the first 5 times) that she can’t eat what you just fed her. Did you read the label? Did you just add milk to that?

On a side note I am really tired of how no one seems to be willing to take this seriously or believe me that food is an issue. It may not be the underlying problem but some foods CLEARLY aggravate the symptoms and I don’t understand why I have to be the food police while everyone else is free to forget and take her out for cheesecake, ketchup and eggs. And then I get to deal with the sobbing child whose burned by her own excrement.

At any rate, we took her to yet another doctor last week who took an full history, starting with the antibiotics at her birth, and her take was that elimination and challenge was giving us confusing results so let’s do a finger prick test to check for common allergens.

That’s right, not 3 VIALS of blood, a finger prick.

We’ll have a follow-up appt. next week to go over the results and see where to go from here.