After the Egg Break

My poor little boys had a mildly  rough time last week.

Because of the egg trial, I’ve been even more paranoid than normal about keeping the floors in my kitchen and dining room cleaned. If Zac gets a crumb, it’s not good…but if Jed gets a bit of egg, it’s an Epi-pen and ER visit – or worse. So I’ve been a tad insane since eggs came in to the picture.

Every night, my kitchen clean up now involves a thorough sweeping of the kitchen and dining room and mopping the floors completely. (That’s in addition to the frantic sweeping I do regularly all day long, by the way.)

Did I mention I hate doing floors?

I do. But I do it anyway, because the alternative is too horrific to think about.

Consequently, my floors are gorgeous…and safe for Zac to walk around on first thing in the morning!

So the last week or so, we’ve been letting Zac walk around in the kitchen and dining room when we first get up and I’m cooking breakfast. It’s perfect! Everything is as clean as it will ever be, and he finally – FINALLY – gets to be set free from his “living room cage”.

In fact, it breaks my heart, in a way. By the time Jed was 7 months old he was allowed more freedoms in our house than Zac has at 22 months.

FPIES sucks on so many different levels beyond just the food restrictions.

At any rate, last Monday we halted the egg trial for Zac for the scheduled 3 day break, with plans to resume the trial on Friday. I continued to clean the floors under my new regime because I didn’t want to get complacent, so he continued to walk around the kitchen and dining room in the morning.

Thursday morning, with no food yet served in the house, I happened to turn around from the sink to see Zac put something in his mouth.

I immediately ran to scoop it out, and when I got it I saw it was the tiniest little piece of a corn puff I’d ever seen! It was a literal crumb!

Where it came from, I don’t know; as I said, I’ve been a madwoman about cleaning the floors…but somehow, somewhere, he found a single crumb I’d missed.

He didn’t eat it, thank the Lord; it was in his mouth for all of ten seconds before I dug it out. I had a mild heart attack, hugged Zac, and thanked my lucky stars I’d turned around when I did.

Then I swept the floors again, and went back to making breakfast.

Zac ate great at breakfast Thursday morning, but after that it was all downhill. He lost all appetite! He was thirsty – VERY thirsty. He nursed an extra hour on Thursday and sucked down water from cups every chance he got. Naptime was shot, and bedtime was a pill.

Friday was very similar to Thursday afternoon. He nursed an extra two hours beyond his norm on Friday, and drank at least three full 16 ounce glasses of water. No nap, and bedtime was wretched. He wanted to sit on my lap and snuggle all day long.

Friday morning I also began eggs again. The symptoms on Thursday hadn’t yet registered as a potential mild FPIES reaction as of 7:00 a.m. on Friday, so I fed him eggs right away. He WANTED to eat them. He was excited to see eggs on his plate. He clapped his hands.

But he wouldn’t/couldn’t eat very much on Friday.

So Saturday, I was getting worried about eggs.

Then, suddenly, Saturday afternoon his appetite came back with a vengeance! He ate all 6 of the muffins we’d made in a span of about 4 hours – PLUS almost half another egg scrambled with quinoa! He went down for bedtime much easier, and nursed his normal 3.5 hours for the day.

Thank goodness for food journals, because I was doing my “glance through the week” on Saturday and remembered that corn puff on Thursday morning.

Apparently, Zac is so sensitive to corn that even having it in his mouth for ten seconds without swallowing it upset his system enough to decrease appetite, make him mildly dehydrated, and make him cranky, clingy, and low-energy!

Sunday he was fabulous! He ate two whole eggs and over two cups of quinoa! He pooped great, acted great, napped great, and went to bed great.

The corn puff definitely threw us for a loop, but Darrel and I are just about ready to call eggs a safe food!

Except…

We went outside on Sunday to clean up the garden a bit in preparation for planting. The kids ran around outside, playing while we worked, and I decided to clean out their kiddie pool. I flattened it out to start cleaning out the dead leaves and water that had accumulated over the winter.

As I dragged the hose over to spray the pool, I saw Zac bent over, drinking some stale, nasty water from a puddle in the pool! A puddle with dead leaves, dirt, and who-knows-what-all floating in it! Ew! (What is it with kids, anyway??)

Since we already know Zac has a poor relationship with “eating nature“, we’re going to give him a few more days before we absolutely declare eggs safe and move on to our next trial.

Hopefully, this time around, we won’t have any reactions to deal with.

Still, corn puffs and nasty water aside, eggs are looking really good for Zac!

As for Jed, he spent most of last week eating as much bread as he could stomach! The child was absolutely on a bread kick.

Only…he also spent many days last week telling me he hurt “in his body”, pointing to his tummy, insisting on wearing a diaper to poop, and complaining of tummy aches.

That got me thinking of the last time he did that, so I flipped through the food journal (again, thank goodness for that!) and realized it was when I fed him a double batch of Banana Muffins.

The common ingredients there? Psyllium husks and chia seeds.

The fructmal people say that both ingredients *should* be safe for fructmal, but that some folks can’t tolerate much (or any) of them.

So now I have to experiment and trial both ingredients to see which one is causing Jed’s tummy troubles.

I’m so irritated! It took me SO long to find bread recipes that he liked and that truly resembled the ‘real deal’, and now I’m probably going to lose those for him. Poor Jed just can’t catch a break!

Ugh!

So, that’s the news from our house over the last week.

How was your weekend?