Zac’s Probiotic Trial: Update III

OK, seriously, y’all.  I DO watch my son.  I DO make Herculean efforts to keep him from eating stuff he’s not supposed to have.  But Zac has an uncanny ability to locate and consume paper that I am just not fast enough to prevent.

My dad has started calling him “Roomba”, because he’s like a little carpet cleaner!

So Tuesday last week, Jed opened the office door when I wasn’t looking and before I knew it, Zac had gone in there and eaten some wrapping paper.

Saturday he ate the “checked bag” tag off the carseat carrying bag that had been unceremoniously thrown into the corner of the living room when we were cleaning out the back of my car.  In all the hubbub of unpacking from our Houston trip, none of us realized the bag still had a paper tag on it until Zac zeroed in on it with his Paper Radar.

Ugh.

So, yes, a bit of a rough paper eating week here, but I am SO SO SO grateful for the probiotics!  We’re still giving him just 1/6th of a dose, but I know they are absolutely preventing full blown FPIES reactions in him…they are working beautifully!!

The wrapping paper was the roughest reaction so far; it was fairly acidic and gave him a bad diaper rash immediately (with some open, bleeding spots on his cute little tushie).  But none of the reactions have involved anything remotely resembling his previous paper eating reactions!

He has a little light eczema on his head.  His poopy diapers are stinky and full of undigested paper, but overall they really aren’t bad.  (As in, no diarrhea or mucous, with good color and good consistency.)

Other than seriously wishing the child would STOP EATING PAPER, I couldn’t be more pleased with how the probiotics are going.  I’m thankful to God that we started the probiotics when we did…otherwise, we’d likely be pulling our hair out by now, probably would have either taken him to the ER for a reaction or considered doing so, and would be a good month behind on food trials.

I puffy-heart GutPro!!!

Oh, and unrelated to FPIES, last week my little go-getter WALKED!!! He’s still not 100% walking yet, but he makes valiant efforts daily to make it a few feet across the carpet all by his little self.

And he taught himself to play catch.  He’ll “play ball” all by himself if no one will play with him.  It’s really cute – and he’s pretty good, actually!

I like to think that these developmental things are happening thanks to the GutPro settling his system down some.  Thank God for our blessings!

Jed was a champ last week with all the traveling we did.  Actually, both kids were champs with the traveling, but most 2 year olds aren’t as flexible about routines and changes as Jed is.  Just tell that child he’s going on a plane ride, though, and he’ll endure most anything!

Sunday night, after all had settled down, we tried him on asparagus to see how he would do.  Monday morning he was a tad difficult to deal with, but not bad at all.  Very manageable – very “almost normal two year old” difficult as opposed to “wigging out on fructose” difficult.

Then one of the dad’s at therapy gave him a lollipop. Sugar. Corn syrup. Yeah.

I stopped him as soon as I saw it, but he’d eaten half of it before I got to him.  I don’t know if it was the lollipop, or the asparagus from the night before, but for the rest of the day, Jed was a pill!  He hardly ate all day (which he usually only does when he’s reacting), whined, tantrumed, refused naps, and was overly defiant and blatantly ignoring us the rest of the day.

So now I don’t know for certain if it is the asparagus or the lollipop that did it.  Since it normally takes 36-40 hours for the fructose to stop wrecking his personality, we’ll see when he snaps back to normal and backtrack from there.  (Though, it could be the combination of both, which would lead to confusing data.  Sigh…I hate accidental exposures.)

Otherwise, Jed is doing great with food, with therapy, and with life.

He actually ran in to the kitchen Sunday afternoon screaming at Darrel “Oh No! Zac! In gate!”, which made no sense to Darrel at all.  So he followed Jed back to where he obviously wanted Darrel to go and saw that the rice cracker Jed had been eating had snapped and a piece flew into the living room side of the gate where Jed couldn’t reach.

So he’d run to tell his Daddy that a piece fell “Inside the gate with Zac – oh no!”

He was very concerned about this. Zac was nowhere near the cracker; in fact, he hadn’t even realized there was FOOD in the living room yet!  But Jed knew his brother couldn’t have it and was determined to keep him safe.  

I have the SWEETEST most THOUGHTFUL little boy on the planet!  I LOVE the way he loves his brother and takes care of him!

What a good kid.

AND…in other news…

After we found out our house foundation was in horrible condition, we went to a lawyer to see what our options were.

He neatly outlined everything that could happen or might happen, and said that the first thing he wanted was for us to call a whole house inspector to come evaluate the foundation and the damage that had occurred on the inside of our house.  This would be the “expert testimony” we would need in court.

He gave us the name of an accredited and licensed home inspector whose entire livelihood is based on inspecting homes where fraud and/or faulty workmanship has caused damage.  In other words, just the expert we needed.

He came out yesterday and inspected the house top to bottom.  When I booked his services, he’d said that he worked on an hourly wage and that for a “job like what yours sounds like”, he expected to be on the premises for 7 or more hours, plus the time it would take him to write up his report.

So you can imagine my surprise when the man was here for a total of 1.5 hours.  

His assessment?  We live in an extremely well-built house.  There’s not a single thing wrong with it.

In fact, our contractor (who we were well on the way of suspecting of shoddy workmanship and downright neglect) did an unusually excellent job of installing our new heating/AC unit, the new lights and vents in the bathroom, and other miscellanous things that this home inspector said are not usually problems, per se, but are typically not done “right”.

Our contractor did them “right”.

So what, I asked, is the cause of all the cracks in the drywall and the tub surround pulling away from the wall?

Shrinkage.  When wood comes from the lumber yard, it is supposed to have a percentage of moisture to it.  Our inspector said that usually lumber has twice – or more – as much moisture in it as it is supposed to have, due to incomplete wood curing and such.  So when the lumber that was to be used in our house was delivered, it was already wetter than it should be.  After the wood was delivered but before it was used, we got a couple of really good rain days where the wood sat in the rain.

Then construction began during one of the hottest, driest summers in recent history.  And by the time the sheet rock was installed, painted, and work had moved on, the wood began drying out from all that excessive heat.  

As a result?  It shrunk.  And it cracked the sheet rock, pulled away (slightly) from cabinets on the walls, and basically did all the things we’d seen that the OTHER guy said were from a bad foundation.

This home inspector was so classy, he even refused to speculate as to why the foundation guy would tell me my foundation was no good when, in fact, it’s in excellent condition.  I suspect he’s a tad unscupulous and was trying to drum up 6K in business, which REALLY ticks me off considering I had – during the conversation – told him that our children were chronically ill and I wasn’t sure if I could return to work or not.

Talk about kick a family when they’re down, right?

Well, no matter.  I’m too grateful for the news that we are not only not  going to have to shell out big bucks to fix our house (and probably go to court to recoup the costs) but that we actually live in a house that is well built and designed to withstand the tests of time to care about the foundation inspectors’ misinformation.

God is so good, you know?  He really does answer prayers.  For my sons, for my house, for my family…so many prayers have been answered lately.

Anyway, that’s the latest update on how the kids and the house are doing.  Come back tomorrow for a new recipe – a new twist on a southern favorite!