January was a month of discovery for us in regards to Jamie’s health issues.

The endoscopy and colonoscopy in early January revealed eosiniphils in his esophagus, a type of cell that indicates the presence of allergic reactions. Oddly, there was no inflammation in either his colon or his esophagus. The extent of the eosinophils puts him right on the border between reflux and eosinophilic esophagitis, which is much more serious.

He is now taking Prevacid daily to control the reflux. This is the same medication that he was on when he was 2 months old. We didn’t think it really did much to help back then, but of course he had undiagnosed food allergies in addition to colic, so any improvement due to the medication was probably being masked by his other problems. This time around, it seems to be helping a great deal.

Next, we went to see an allergist. She talked to us extensively about his symptoms, then performed a skin scratch test (which was SO much fun, let me tell you — try keeping a naked unhappy toddler lying still on his stomach for 20 minutes so he doesn’t disturb the itchy itchy allergens on his back). The results, which have up to a 50% false positive rate, indicate that he is likely allergic to eggs, milk, and wheat.

I think that we could fairly easily avoid eggs and milk, but the wheat thing is going to be really difficult. Wheat, or byproducts thereof, is in EVERYTHING. Just think: bread, rolls, tortillas, bagels, muffins, pancakes, crackers, pretzels, pizza, pasta, cereal, soy sauce, MSG, cookies, cake, breading on baked or fried items, …. the list goes on and on.

Luckily he is likely NOT allergic to oats, corn, rice, soy, dust, mold, or cats. I’m very pleased that he handles soy OK. We have thought that he was sensitive to it since May of last year; and perhaps he was, but has outgrown it. Soy is another ingredient that’s in absolutely everything.

The allergist recommended we see a nutritionist to help us formulate a diet plan for Jamie, since we were at a loss for what we could safely feed him and still be sure he gets all the nutrients he needs. When the nutritionist weighed him, it seemed that he had lost a little bit of weight over the past couple of weeks. Of course every doctor’s scale is different, but it raised some alarm bells. She wanted us to get more calories into him each day (a baby his age and size needs about 1200) in order to keep his weight up and maintain proper nutrition. So we’ve thickened his formula by 50% and we are trying at every opportunity to stuff food into him.

He is rather resistant to this idea, though. I suppose a lifetime of food equals pain means that it’s going to take some time for him to learn to like food. We have an enormously difficult time getting him to eat much of anything at mealtimes or as snacks. Occasionally he’ll seem hungry and eat a whole serving of oatmeal or fruit or veggie puree, but usually it’s a struggle to get him to eat more than 2 or 3 bites.

It turns out that he likes bananas (and isn’t acutely reacting to them like he did last summer) but hates mashed potatoes. We were counting on potatoes to be a star of his diet, since they are nutrient-rich, starchy, and full of calories, especially with the soy margarine we added to them. We’re going to keep offering them to him, though, in hopes that he’ll change his mind.

And now, actually, he seems to be off his banana kick too. So we keep trying to find things that he likes.

Next week, he goes back to the allergist for more extensive testing. They’ll put actual food samples on his back, and seal it up with a bandage. He keeps it on for two days, after which they check daily to see how he’s reacted. This is supposedly a more accurate test.

The good news is, he does not seem to be in nearly as much pain anymore. He still occasionally has gas or is just generally fussy in an I-don’t-feel-well kind of way, but it’s much better than it used to be. And he sleeps better as well. He still wakes up at least twice per night, usually three times, and wants formula, but he’s generally easy to get back to sleep. It is probably helping that we’ve put a mattress on the floor of his room and are letting him “put himself to sleep” there, with one of us lying next to him. He seems to prefer that to being held and rocked. Once he’s asleep we transfer him to the crib, but are considering alternative options to that now.

I am doing casual research to broaden my culinary repertoire to include foods that Jamie can eat (no wheat, eggs, or dairy — more on that in my next post).

I adapted this casserole from the Moosewood Cookbook. It is delicious. Sadly, Jamie did not seem to think so. But it was a very different taste and texture from anything he’s used to. Maybe next time he’ll give it another chance.

Spinach-Rice Casserole with Beef

2 cups water
2 cups Minute Rice (or use regular white or brown rice, and cook it according to package directions)
1/2 pound ground beef, 85% lean
1 medium yellow onion, diced
1 pound frozen chopped spinach
2 teaspoons garlic salt
1/4 teaspoon cayenne pepper
1/4 teaspoon nutmeg
1/4 cup sunflower seeds
Sharp cheddar cheese, shredded

Cook rice according to package directions (for Minute Rice, boil 2 cups of water, add rice, stir, cover, remove from heat, and let sit for 5 minutes). In a medium saucepan or Dutch oven, cook ground beef over medium-high heat until browned. Add onion and spinach; cook 5 minutes. Add seasonings and sunflower seeds.

Top with shredded sharp cheddar cheese, for the non-allergic. Vegans can leave out the ground beef and still have a tasty nutritious meal.

Last Monday Doc took Jamieson to the pediatrician for his one-year checkup. Overall everything (other than the usual digestive issues and eczema) is fine. He is in the 95th percentile for height, weight, and head circumference — back on the charts, at last! Here’s hoping he slows down a bit in growth. He is 27 pounds 13 ounces and 31-1/2 inches tall.

The pediatrician (whom we just love; Dr. Michael Brown with Pediatric Associates of Dallas, in case you’re in the market for one) asked if we’d made any progress with his food sensitivities and eczema. Doc told him that things were overall pretty much the same, but that the past few nights had been really bad, with Jamie waking up between 6 and 8 times per night in pain. Dr. Brown asked what Dr. Whitney, our gastroenterologist, was doing to treat it — and had she done an endoscopy yet? (No.) We hadn’t seen her in a while but were due to a few days later, and he asked us to have her give him a call so they could discuss Jamie’s case. Now maybe doctors wanting to work together like that is common practice, I don’t know. But it’s a really good feeling to know that our current doctors actually care enough to try to solve our son’s problem, rather than just telling us that there’s nothing wrong or that WE need to work harder to eliminate his food allergies through diet.

We saw Dr. Whitney last Thursday. I told her right off the bat that we were at a point where we felt we needed to try something different. Controlling his symptoms through diet just has not been working well enough. She immediately suggested that the next course of action should probably be that endoscopy that Dr. Brown had mentioned, plus a colonoscopy and biopsies. She had hoped that he would grow out of his sensitivities, but since he was now a year old and still having difficulties, this is the next step in the quest to solve his problems.

So Jamie goes in on Wednesday for surgery. :(

I’m not sure if “surgery” is the best term; they’re not going to cut him open or anything but he will be under general anaesthesia. They’ll stick cameras up his butt and down his throat (Doc hopes that they don’t just rinse off the one camera between uses) to look for inflammation as well as the presence of certain types of cells that would indicate allergic reactions. And they’ll take biopsies of his intestines and esophagus (I think).

And after that, they’ll be able to recommend treatment. There’s a possibility that he’ll go on allergy medication, which will have an added benefit (if you choose to see it that way) of making him drowsy at night. He may also go to see an allergist for a skin scratch test.

I’m a little bit worried about the anaesthesia part of things, but I really think that this is the right thing to do. I’m not sure what else we can do at this point. Life really hasn’t been fair to Jamie. He  just doesn’t feel well most of the time. I hope that we can find some answers and he can begin to feel good and be able to get some quality sleep.

Jamieson began walking on January 1! Happy New Year, everyone!

And with the Infant Commander’s newfound mobility comes a promotion and new title: Lord Emperor Toddler.

He’s not too terribly excited about walking yet; he doesn’t do it all the time by any means. But when we do ask him to walk and he manages to go a few feet, he is all smiles and SO proud of himself.

Jamieson has had a bad couple of nights. Last night and the night before, he required us to be with him nearly constantly throughout the night. Doc and I have been taking shifts, laying with him on the mattress we put on his floor, trying to keep him asleep.

He’s been having a particularly rough time of it really since Thankgiving or a little before. We went through a stretch of a week or so where he seemed more relaxed and was only waking once in the night instead of his up-till-then usual twice. The norm since then has been three to four wakings, until the past few days when it’s been six to eight times a night.

Last night his nose was very clogged and he was having trouble breathing, and that woke him up numerous times. And of course, his usual problems with gas and intestinal pain kept waking him up too. He’s been bolting awake from a sound sleep, shrieking and arching his back and stiffening his legs. It takes a long time to get him back to sleep, and we haven’t been able to set him back down in the crib; he’ll wake up the instant you put him down. So he’s been sleeping (if you can call it that) next to us instead.

Which means, of course, that we don’t sleep well either. He moves and twitches constantly throughout the night, and if we do manage to fall asleep ourselves, it’s fitful since we’re so attuned to his every movement.

We are getting desperate for answers. A one year old not sleeping through the night, EVER, is somewhat unusual, but a one year old who wakes up screaming in pain multiple times throughout the night… well, there’s definitely something wrong there.

His pediatrician is very interested in getting this problem fixed, whatever it may be. We go to see the gastroenterologist again on Thursday, and the pediatrician wants to talk to her about what’s going on. I’m so tired of hearing “he’ll outgrow his food sensitivities” and that we just have to wait it out and continue to try to control his pain through diet. I mean, if that’s the only answer then that’s the only answer and we’ll deal with it, but it seems like it doesn’t matter what he eats, EVERYTHING causes him pain. There’s got to be SOMETHING we can do… isn’t there?

So Jamie now has six teeth: his two front lower ones, and four front upper ones. It’s terribly cute.

We didn’t even notice tooth #6 coming in this past week because its arrival coincided with a bout of “hand, foot, and mouth disease” (I am not making that up). Poor kiddo had a 103.2 fever last Saturday, then developed a spotty rash on his feet, ankles, leg-fat creases, hands, and around his mouth. Also, we suspect he had a very sore throat. The fever only lasted about a day and a half (and high fevers have their blessings, such as verrrrrrry sleepy babies), and the rash didn’t itch, but the sore throat kept him from sleeping more than an hour at a time for two days. Luckily, the virus is very mild and he was feeling much better within a couple of days. He didn’t eat much of anything except his formula, and half-frozen applesauce.

Jamie is now standing on his own, and occasionally he will take a couple of steps, but he’s not walking yet. I’m not exactly eager for that to happen — I can’t imagine how difficult it will be to keep up with him once he can walk — but at the same time, he’s so heavy now (probably 28 pounds) that it will be nice to not have to carry him all the time.

He isn’t saying any words yet (unless you count his normal babbling, and I can’t tell whether any of it’s purposeful yet or not), but he is beginning to communicate by pointing. He’ll point at things he’s interested in, such as his sippy cup or a toy, or he’ll point and make an inquisitive noise, which we interpret as him asking what something is. And we can ask him where various things are, like the ceiling fan or the light or the clock or the Christmas tree, and he can look or point in the right direction. So he clearly understands a LOT of what we are saying now. It’s nice!

And he will be ONE YEAR OLD on Tuesday! I hope to write a year-in-review type post this week. Mom is coming into town tomorrow so I might actually have a few spare moments to write!

Here’s some recent movies of Mr. Pants:

New Help for Moms with Postpartum Depression

By Bonnie Rochman, Parenting

An inpatient psychiatric unit specifically dedicated to women suffering perinatal (prenatal and postpartum) mood disorders opens and gets new moms the help they need.

hortly before last Mother’s Day, 28-year-old Lauren Meehan-Machos broke down in front of her startled husband. “This is more than I can handle,” she sobbed.

The typically confident and self-assured Cary, NC, mom — a former Miss New Hampshire — had felt overwhelmed and panicky since giving birth to her first child, Luke, two months prior. She’d obsessed so much about getting feedings and naps “right” that she stopped eating and sleeping herself. She cried continuously. She started throwing up.

Her doctor had prescribed medication for postpartum anxiety. But, she told her husband, the day before, she’d found herself at the wheel of her red Chevy Impala, rain falling in sheets from the sky, thinking, If I drive my car off the road, all this will go away.

“I was stunned,” recalls Kevin Machos. “She’d done a very good job of hiding what she was feeling.”

Immediately, Meehan-Machos’s obstetrician referred her to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC). There, doctors had recently debuted a groundbreaking inpatient psychiatric unit, the first in the nation specifically tailored to women suffering perinatal (prenatal and postpartum) mood disorders. Unlike a general psychiatric unit, it offered:

• A core group of doctors specializing in perinatal issues
• Psychiatrists attuned to medications that wouldn’t harm a pregnancy or a nursing newborn
• An unusual policy of allowing children, even babies, on the ward during extended visiting hours
• Mom-only counseling focused on anxiety and bonding.

And though there were only six beds, one was available for her.

Read more…

So the Infant Commander has skipped one of his two nightly feedings each night since last Friday. Could this be the start of a trend? His exhausted parents sincerely hope so!

Also, he stood all by himself for about 20 seconds this morning. That’s the first time he’s ever stood without support for that long. He was holding on to the edge of his Baby Corral, and I handed him a toy. He grabbed it with one hand, then let go and used the other to start pushing buttons on the toy. I don’t think he realized that he was standing without support until he fell on his butt and looked extremely surprised!

Update: this evening he stood on his own two baby feet, without support, multiple times! He clearly understood what he was doing, too. He had a small book in both hands and I was supporting his torso. I took my hands away and he grinned at me and stood there, slightly swaying, for probably 15 seconds before beginning to fall. I steadied him and took my hands away again. We repeated this probably 8 times or so before he got tired of it and crawled off. Milestone achieved!

So on Friday night, I tried for about an hour to get Jamie to go to bed. He just didn’t want to/didn’t feel well, and was getting more and more upset and angry as I tried to soothe him to sleep.

Finally I couldn’t take the shrieking any longer, so I set him down in his crib and walked out of the room. This is exactly what parents are supposed to do when they get frustrated — set the baby down in a safe place and leave to take a breather. I set the timer for 15 minutes (yes, 15… I was pretty frustrated) and by the end of it, he was lying down in the crib, still crying, but not standing at the edge of the crib and hopping like a monkey, like before.

I decided to give it another few minutes and see where it was leading. And at the end of five minutes, he had fallen asleep. This was 8:45 p.m.

This may not seem like a big deal to you, but to me, it is one of only a few times (literally… you can count it on one hand) that he has fallen asleep without a parent rocking/bouncing/soothing him to sleep. Crying yourself out is a crappy way to fall asleep, for sure, but apparently he actually can do it when he’s tired enough.

And after that, he stayed asleep until 4:20 a.m.! That is seven and a half hours in a row!! He semi-awakened twice during that period but both times self-soothed back to sleep.

Saturday night was a very different story, though. I got him to sleep, laid him down, and he woke back up. Instead of picking him up and re-sleeping him, though, I let him cry again. This time it only took about 5 minutes before he fell asleep.

He woke up about 2 hours later. We decided to let him cry and see if he’d fall asleep again on his own. It took maybe 3o minutes, but he did. It was dreadful, listening to him shriek.

About an hour later, he woke again. I tried for 40 minutes to get him back to sleep, and then Doc tried for about two hours. Finally he took him downstairs and we let him crawl around in his play area for a little while. Eventually I was able to get him back asleep. This was like 3:30 in the morning.

When we got up in the morning, we realized that at some point he’d vomited in his crib.

We felt absolutely awful about the whole night.

Last night we didn’t cry it out. And he skipped his second feeding. Slept straight through from 12:30 to 6:30. Go figure.

Here are some recent photos.

Jamieson has recently learned to:

• Crawl really fast
• Cruise around furniture with grace and strength
• Point with an index finger
• Point at your nose when asked to
• Bark like a dog
• Clap his little hands together in applause
• Play pattycake when asked to
• Enjoy playing peekaboo
• Shake hands
• Roll a ball back and forth with you
• Roll a toy across the carpet with one hand while crawling

The milestones are flying by like crazy.

He also has gotten his top left front tooth, and should have the top right one within the next few days. I think he’s going to have huge front teeth like me. :)

He doesn’t yet use words to indicate something concrete or something he wants, but his babbling has expanded to dada, tata, mama, baba, and nana, among others. And he puts all those sounds together in strings of nonsense syllables and cute squeals and trills. It’s completely adorable to listen to him babble. He says “daddn” a lot – like “daddy” but with an “n” sound on the end instead of “y.” That’s one of my favorites.

We just returned from a two week vacation to the Pacific Northwest. We stayed with my parents most of the time, except for two days near Portland, Oregon (all five of us went) and two days in Victoria, BC (just me and Doc). My brother Bob came in from Boston for four days, and I actually got to see my ever-elusive brother Mike one afternoon.

Vacationing with a nine month old is wonderful and exhausting.

The weather was cool, sometimes rainy, sometimes crisp and sunny. I had to go buy a pair of fuzzy socks to keep my feet warm at night. We lit a fire in the soapstone stove one night, and had a wienie roast (and s’mores!) by the fire pit another night.

It was absolutely marvelous to have two extra adults to help keep Jamieson entertained. He seemed to hit some developmental milestones while at Gramma and Grandpa’s (more about that in another post). Jamie had a tough time adjusting to the time change and for the first several days he was awake and ready to begin his day by 4 a.m. or before. My mom saved my sanity by letting me wake her then to take Jamieson so that I could go back to bed for a few more hours. He got a tooth while we were there (his top left front tooth) so there were quite a few dicey days and nights.

Jamie was the best-behaved baby on the plane, both on the way there and the way back. He slept for about half of each flight. He was hard to handle the rest of the time but Doc and I are experts at it by now and I think other passengers noticed and appreciated how hard we were working to keep him calm and quiet; several of them mentioned to us how well-behaved he was.

Doc and I spent our first significant amount of time away from Jamie. We’d only ever been apart from him for a few hours at a time before, so last weekend my parents babysat while we went to Victoria, BC for about two days. We missed Jamie, but it was also wonderful to have a little break, to sleep in, to not get up in the night, to do what we wanted when we wanted. Actually I hadn’t realized how much we probably NEEDED that time by ourselves until we did it. I think that all new parents (and old ones too!) need to get away from the kids on a regular basis. It’s good for the marriage and your sanity. And I think it’s good for the kids, too.

Here are a few photos from the trip:

Sadly, S0mething Shiny Disorder is suffering lately. The updates and blatherings on are few and far between.

I am sure my two readers are simply crushed by this shocking news.

Lately, the little free time I have (i.e., when the baby is asleep) is spent either sleeping or doing chores or running errands or spending quality time with my husband. All of that trumps personal writing at this point.

I hope that once Jamie is a bit more self-managing, I will begin to see an increase in the time I have available to write. I do miss it.

That being said, I am working on a catch-up post about (what else?) the latest on Jamieson. Stay tuned.