Ch-ch-ch-changes!

It’s been a big weekend with a lot of changes for our family!

Friday morning Darrel announced over breakfast that he was 100% confident that quinoa had proven safe for Zac. Which meant we were ready to move on to the next food trial.

Eek!

We decided on broccoli, so Friday night I steamed up one stalk of broccoli and served it for dinner.

Zac. LOVED. It.

Loved it as in “help Mommy scrape the broccoli off the platter onto the tray table with his fork” loved it!

He ate an entire stalk of broccoli that night, and seemed just fine.

Saturday night repeated the performance. Zac loves his broccoli!

It didn’t deter him from eating quinoa nuggets and crackers, either. He continued to chomp down on those all day Friday and Saturday.

Sunday, however, was not so great.

He suddenly had no appetite. For breakfast he barely managed to eat two quinoa nuggets, when he’d previously eaten between 6-15 nuggets per meal.

He didn’t eat any crackers that day, either. At lunch he ate about 7 nuggets, but only one for dinner.

He was mildly cranky and clingy all day, and just seemed…out of sorts. Not himself.

We decided not to give him any more broccoli for a while, but shortly after making that decision, he suddenly seemed to snap out of it!

After nursing him at bedtime, he popped up, all smiles, waved at Daddy, grinned and tried to grab my phone, and had the “glimmer” back in his eyes. He proceeded to babble more than he had the entire day, and when I asked if he wanted some quinoa nuggets he clapped his hands, nodded yes, and bounced with glee when I picked him up.

Then he let me put him in the high chair, which he had not let me do all day long. He helped me put the tray on his chair, and clapped his hands and did his “happy dance” in the seat when I brought him some nuggets.

Then he ate 8 nuggets without stopping, while watching Baby Einstein on TV with his little feet crossed at the ankles. Just chillin’, Mama!

So I’m not convinced this is an FPIES thing. It could well be the early signs of a reaction, but I’m wondering if there aren’t some other explanations for his Sunday strangeness.

For starters, normal FPIES reactions don’t usually get better that quickly. They usually continue to escalate downwards.

Secondly, his poop is just fine, and for him strange poops are one of the first things we see during an FPIES reaction.

Also, broccoli can have a gassy, upset tummy effect on people sometimes, so that could be playing a part.

He’s also been drooling crazy amounts this weekend at moments, leading us to suspect teething is rearing its ugly little head, too.

Plus, one other BIG change in our house happened this weekend that could have thrown him out of whack.

Remember when I talked about needing to get rid of the cats and replace our carpeting because of corntamination and Zac’s bucket needing to be kept empty? It was a small paragraph in a large post, and I didn’t think much of it beyond that being a part of our story to tell.

Well. After reading that post, a dear friend of mine in town contacted me and offered a gift to my family I couldn’t believe: she and her husband wanted to replace the carpeting in our living room for us.

I couldn’t believe her generosity! I’m still sort of flabbergasted about the whole thing.

It’s taken some time to figure out the what and when of it all, but Friday morning we met at the store and picked up all the supplies, that night Darrel ripped out all the carpeting in our house, and Saturday morning began floor installation!

My friends want to remain anonymous, but they know who they are. What they can’t possibly know is the depth of gratitude Darrel and I feel towards them for this incredibly perfect gift for Zac. There are just not enough words to say it, and certainly not good enough words to say how much we appreciate them for what they’ve done.

Removing the tea and potato chips from my diet, I believe, helped Zac find his first safe food.

Removing all the trace contamination from the cat food and litter residue will, I believe, continue to allow him to find safe foods.

They didn’t just give us flooring; in no small way, they gave my son the ability to eat and stay alive. 

No, there just aren’t enough words for this one. Not at all. 

(excuse me while I go sniffle a bit)

Okay, so, back to the ‘Zac Sunday Strangeness’…all that ripping up flooring and putting new flooring down kicked up a lot of dust and cat hair, so that could have been something that made Zac feel a little off, too.

In the end, I don’t think he’s having an FPIES reaction to broccoli. My gut is telling me it’s teething, broccoli gas, and maybe dust allergies that made him so weird on Sunday.

So, fingers crossed that tonight I can give him a much smaller serving of broccoli, and that over time, he’ll build up the enzymes to digest broccoli without getting painful gas. The teething will get better, and the cat hair and dust will settle, and in a few weeks, we’ll be calling broccoli SAFE! (Oh, I hope!)

Another big change happened on Sunday night. My parents were finally ready to take the cats in, so we drove the cats over to Grandma and PopPop’s house.

Jed thought it was great fun to go on a car ride with the kitties…until we got in the car to come home. Then it wasn’t okay.

“I need my cats!” he cried. And continued to cry that off and on for the next 50 minutes as we drove home.

Sigh…I’d tried to explain what was going to happen to him beforehand, but I guess he just didn’t understand. Now his little heart is broken, and that makes my already sad heart want to break, too.

For their part, the cats will be fine. When we got there, they both hid out under the couch, but they both know my parents and will acclimate quickly, I’m sure.

After all, any house where they can wander freely without children shrieking or scaring them half to death MUST be an improvement, right?

So now I just have to figure out how to recover the furniture we have, and sell our sofa (no way to recover that), and do a last big clean sweep through the house to remove all remaining cat traces, and we will have de-catted the house effectively for Zac!

I sure hope I’m right, and that all these changes help Zac keep an empty bucket and a growing list of Safe Foods. This was absolutely a whirlwind weekend for us. I think my head is spinning!

Oh, and at their weekly Sunday weigh-in, both boys gained weight!

Zac has finally, blessedly, GAINED ONE WHOLE POUND!! He’s 21 pounds right now, which is the most he’s ever weighed! I’ll say it again: God Bless Quinoa!!!

Jed is up to a whopping 29.4 pounds, which is the most HE’S ever weighed!  Woot!!

Keep growing, babies!!

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So, what’s the most extreme thing you’ve ever done for your kids health?