I come to this forum frequently because I have a very small child with multiple food allergies and random reactions. But I don't stick around because I am very easily overwhelmed by the vast amount of knowledge on this forum.
So this thread is going to be my toe-hold. I intend to log our efforts to heal the gut of our 3.5 year old son and to catalog the questions and answers I encounter in the next two posts; this one is a quick introduction to our situation.
REGARDING DS1
WEIGHT/HEIGHT:
at 3.5 years, he weighs just over 26 pounds and is about 36" tall. He is in a slow slide down the percentiles. Very slow. But perceptible.
FOODS:
IgE-- is that the skin test result? He had positive skin wheal reactions to:
dairy, egg white, tree nuts.
We have had shellfish twice in his life, and he had pronounced diarrhea afterwards both times.
As for the other things, he sometimes reacts and sometimes doesn't. (Citrus and strawberries in mass quantities causes a rough rash and a peeing frenzy, and body-wide terrible hives in even larger quantities. Soy sauce, pineapple and tomato has caused a red rash to spring up around his mouth before, but not always, and kiwi and pineapple make the inside of his mouth itch sometimes. We suspected salicylates, and try our best to balance high-intake days with more sulphur-containing foods and epsom salt baths, which seem to help.)
Gluten we've pulled "just to see."
SLEEP:
He started sleeping through the night at 2 years and 2 months. Before that, it was approximately every 3 hours that he would wake, and as a newborn, sometimes every 45 minutes for weeks a time. I know others have been through worse, but I'm still waiting for a medal for surviving his infancy, what with the colic, bloody diarrhea, and eczema.
SKIN:
Body-wide eczema as a young thing pre-dairy elimination. Mostly gone after dairy was cut out, but occassional, apparent "random" bouts made me crazy with detective flurying. He also had rampant, consistent diaper rash not associated with BMs, though he has always been EC'd and rarely sat in wet pants for longer than 5 minutes. His groin rash brought me to tears. It would appear suddenly, and in full force, and then be gone on its own terms. Around 2 or so years (around the time he began to sleep better) the rash disappeared.
He occasionally deals with eczema behind the knees and rough skin all over his body, but we seem to have figured out the triggers for the all-over body hives. (Those bouts were awful.)
URINE:
At 3.5, still has bouts of urinary incontinence. Sometimes these do seem to be regressions and cause by normal bouts of preschooler-stress; other times they last for a couple of days and seem to surprise him. I have noted what I think is a correspondence with too many salicylate-high foods.
He almost always dribbles a bit in his undies before making it to the potty.
STOOLS:
Mostly undigested and recognizable food, mostly floating, always copious amounts, often twice a day. I seriously do not understand how, even if he were pooping out everything he was consuming, he could be pooping that much. On occassion we get a formed, dense, solid little poo that goes to the bottom of the potty and I have no idea why. I feel that we saw more of these immediately after going off gluten.
He often has greenish stools.
If a stool is not green, it is most likely to be orangey, and those occassionally are tinged with bright red blood. Sometimes I see blood somehow inside the poop, othertimes it just seems to be around the anus.
He has never, ever been constipated. (DS2 has been three or four times in his 17 months, so I know what it would be like.)
OTHER:
He has a terrible appetite. I am following Ellyn Satter's advice, and I do not feel it has helped one twit getting him to eat more. Other parents have remarked to me about how little he seems to eat. (Of course, most other parents are okay with bribing their kids to eat or coercing them to do so; we felt that doing either was ultimately backfiring and causing him to feel eating times were stressful.) Lunch today: a bite of a cracker with humus on top. three bites of a carrot. The corner off his soy cheese. 1/4 cup of kombucha. Voila!
He craves baking powder, and we have to keep it hidden and under lock and key. He also really likes ice, but what preschooler doesn't, right? But yes, he is iron-deficient anemic.
He has a heart murmur that was determined by a pediatric cardiologist to be benign, but of unknown origin.
He has asthma that flares up only with colds.
He loves raw sulfur containing veggies (MMM! KALE!) and drank with glee a batch of kombucha that had been brewing for 11 MONTHS. (That's another thread.) (And yes, there was backlash in his skin after that.)
I crave sugar like mad. And I give it to him more than I feel right, but we did see a nutritionist that scolded me for not giving him more sweets since he so obviously needs the calories, and that left me feeling detached from my best instincts.
He is still breastfed. Probably an average of 1.5 full feedings in 24 hours. I hate nursing him, but feel compelled to do so.
So this thread is going to be my toe-hold. I intend to log our efforts to heal the gut of our 3.5 year old son and to catalog the questions and answers I encounter in the next two posts; this one is a quick introduction to our situation.
REGARDING DS1
WEIGHT/HEIGHT:
at 3.5 years, he weighs just over 26 pounds and is about 36" tall. He is in a slow slide down the percentiles. Very slow. But perceptible.
FOODS:
IgE-- is that the skin test result? He had positive skin wheal reactions to:
dairy, egg white, tree nuts.
We have had shellfish twice in his life, and he had pronounced diarrhea afterwards both times.
As for the other things, he sometimes reacts and sometimes doesn't. (Citrus and strawberries in mass quantities causes a rough rash and a peeing frenzy, and body-wide terrible hives in even larger quantities. Soy sauce, pineapple and tomato has caused a red rash to spring up around his mouth before, but not always, and kiwi and pineapple make the inside of his mouth itch sometimes. We suspected salicylates, and try our best to balance high-intake days with more sulphur-containing foods and epsom salt baths, which seem to help.)
Gluten we've pulled "just to see."
SLEEP:
He started sleeping through the night at 2 years and 2 months. Before that, it was approximately every 3 hours that he would wake, and as a newborn, sometimes every 45 minutes for weeks a time. I know others have been through worse, but I'm still waiting for a medal for surviving his infancy, what with the colic, bloody diarrhea, and eczema.
SKIN:
Body-wide eczema as a young thing pre-dairy elimination. Mostly gone after dairy was cut out, but occassional, apparent "random" bouts made me crazy with detective flurying. He also had rampant, consistent diaper rash not associated with BMs, though he has always been EC'd and rarely sat in wet pants for longer than 5 minutes. His groin rash brought me to tears. It would appear suddenly, and in full force, and then be gone on its own terms. Around 2 or so years (around the time he began to sleep better) the rash disappeared.
He occasionally deals with eczema behind the knees and rough skin all over his body, but we seem to have figured out the triggers for the all-over body hives. (Those bouts were awful.)
URINE:
At 3.5, still has bouts of urinary incontinence. Sometimes these do seem to be regressions and cause by normal bouts of preschooler-stress; other times they last for a couple of days and seem to surprise him. I have noted what I think is a correspondence with too many salicylate-high foods.
He almost always dribbles a bit in his undies before making it to the potty.
STOOLS:
Mostly undigested and recognizable food, mostly floating, always copious amounts, often twice a day. I seriously do not understand how, even if he were pooping out everything he was consuming, he could be pooping that much. On occassion we get a formed, dense, solid little poo that goes to the bottom of the potty and I have no idea why. I feel that we saw more of these immediately after going off gluten.
He often has greenish stools.
If a stool is not green, it is most likely to be orangey, and those occassionally are tinged with bright red blood. Sometimes I see blood somehow inside the poop, othertimes it just seems to be around the anus.
He has never, ever been constipated. (DS2 has been three or four times in his 17 months, so I know what it would be like.)
OTHER:
He has a terrible appetite. I am following Ellyn Satter's advice, and I do not feel it has helped one twit getting him to eat more. Other parents have remarked to me about how little he seems to eat. (Of course, most other parents are okay with bribing their kids to eat or coercing them to do so; we felt that doing either was ultimately backfiring and causing him to feel eating times were stressful.) Lunch today: a bite of a cracker with humus on top. three bites of a carrot. The corner off his soy cheese. 1/4 cup of kombucha. Voila!
He craves baking powder, and we have to keep it hidden and under lock and key. He also really likes ice, but what preschooler doesn't, right? But yes, he is iron-deficient anemic.
He has a heart murmur that was determined by a pediatric cardiologist to be benign, but of unknown origin.
He has asthma that flares up only with colds.
He loves raw sulfur containing veggies (MMM! KALE!) and drank with glee a batch of kombucha that had been brewing for 11 MONTHS. (That's another thread.) (And yes, there was backlash in his skin after that.)
I crave sugar like mad. And I give it to him more than I feel right, but we did see a nutritionist that scolded me for not giving him more sweets since he so obviously needs the calories, and that left me feeling detached from my best instincts.
He is still breastfed. Probably an average of 1.5 full feedings in 24 hours. I hate nursing him, but feel compelled to do so.
We shall see what the night and morning bring. (I predict: bloody diarrhea.)
(wink.) 
