Allergies & Home Improvement Stuff

Allergies, allergies... Snowdrop's blood-work came back as positive for peanut allergy AND for a milk allergy! I guess it was a good idea to get her tested after all. ;) But I was right about the peanuts! OK so now we've been going through all the food items in our house that contain peanuts, or might contain peanuts, or was manufactured in a facility that also has peanuts, etc. I'm trying to get everything together in one spot. We don't want to throw everything out ~ that would be wasteful. At the same time, we're being SUPER diligent that our Little Peanut Lady, as she's come to be known around here, doesn't get any contact with that stuff. So we're eating off our peanut products as fast as we can, confining consumption of these products to our kitchen. Sometimes Snowdrop stands at the closed gate and looks in so sad eyed. Poor thing.

I'll be going grocery shopping this week and I'll definitely be reading every label, thrice.
{Thrice.} We took a look at cereals just to see and I can't remember if we found one cereal that didn't have peanut product in it! I know this is going to take a lot of getting used to. My mother-in-law is such a wonderful person. She has already outlawed peanuts in shells from the house {I think she secretly is pleased she won't have to pick up shell pieces from her floors! And I'm okay with that!} I know she has already cleaned their house twice since we found out ~ there will be nary a trace of peanut there. It's such a relief to know that I don't need to worry {which of course I will anyways...} about when we go over there. Obviously we'll always have our Epi-Pen on us in case of an emergency. My mother seemed a bit "burdened" by the fact that they'll need to avoid peanut stuff when we're in town... she's just going to need to get used to that.

I'll try to remember to bring my camera when I go to the store. It would be fun to post pictures of what I ended up being able to buy... and maybe of what I couldn't buy. I don't know. Would that be interesting to anyone? :) It's certainly going to be a change; Hubby thinks we'll end up spending more money. I'm not so sure. I know we'll be eating healthier because more processed foods are exposed to nuts than fresh foods and more "whole" foods. {This is from what I can tell. If anyone has information to contradict that, I would love to know! :)} So the silver lining, in my eyes, is that we'll be able to eat a little healthier and that will be very good for us.

So about the milk allergy. She always spat up as a baby ~ but that was never considered something abnormal, I mean, babies spit up right? So we never thought she'd be allergic to milk. She DOES have bad eczema but I never thought (neither did the the doctor) that it was allergy related. Anyways, so the doctor recommended we try a one week elimination of dairy products. So cheese, butter {ha, I don't feed them butter!}, yogurt, etc. Anything dairy related, except of course her actual drinking milk. This is to see if there is any effect on the eczema.

When we cut out peanut related products we noticed an immediate decrease in her eczema so I think cutting out most of her dairy intake will too. We just started that portion of it, I'll post about it again.

In Home Improvement News, we are adding open shelves into my kitchen. I'm very excited about this, and if I get my way we'll be adding them tonight! {Fingers crossed!} I'll post Before and After pictures of that. Our Dynex brand memory card reader is working out really well, in fact, it's actually less work to set up than the Handycam stuff. Score! That thing breaking was a blessing in disguise. :)

I guess that's it for now. Thanks to all of you who have linked up to Project365! Sometimes it's not easy remembering to take a picture every day! And it's great when others acknowledge my work, and share their work with me! So thanks! I sure do appreciate it! :)