Food sensitivities.
You don’t expect them, and when faced with them in your newborn, you never quite know what to do at first, and that is what this blog is all about. My wife and I recently welcomed our first child, our baby daughter Emma Jane. She is now nearly three months old. Our hope with this blog is to share our experiences as we come to understand and respond to this new challenge.
You don’t expect them, and when faced with them in your newborn, you never quite know what to do at first, and that is what this blog is all about. My wife and I recently welcomed our first child, our baby daughter Emma Jane. She is now nearly three months old. Our hope with this blog is to share our experiences as we come to understand and respond to this new challenge.
It was fairly soon after she was
born that we realized that something was different than normal, and with some
research, we decided to take out dairy from my wife’s diet, to see if the
change in her nutrition intake would improve my daughter’s difficulty in eating
and sleeping. The decision to remove dairy completely from my wife’s diet was
later confirmed as the right call by our daughter’s pediatrician.
While reading the book The Happiest Baby on the Block by Dr. Harvey Karp, we learned that the battle between an infant’s immune system and the foreign protein is often in the intestines, due to them being underdeveloped. The lining allows large, allergy-triggering molecules to enter the bloodstream, but over the first year of life, Emma’s intestinal lining gradually will become a better barrier to these proteins.
After making the initial changes improvements were seen; but with every step forward, we’d inadvertently take a step back. Take for instance, the first time my wife decided to implement soy into her diet, enjoying soy latte’s from Starbucks for two days this past winter. Those two days weren’t very good days for Emma Jane, which put another food on our list to avoid.
Leanne and I continually seek to improve our choices of the food and nutrition we give our bodies. This desire has only been amplified by the recent plus-one we’ve experienced. As a full-time college student myself – I attend Arizona State University, and will be graduating in May with a B.A. in English – and Leanne a member of the childcare/nanny profession, the two of us live on a tight budget, something that is not uncommon these days. Making an allergy-safe nutritional plan happen is no easy task, but hopefully sharing it on this blog will help you with your own experiences.
If you’re like Leanne, this is new and strange for you after living so many years eating the way you wanted to. It is easy to take for granted the foods we eat when we don’t have a reason to look closely at what they contain. Honestly, this situation of ours has forced us to eat healthier, which is something we always try to do but often fail at due to the hustle and bustle of daily life.
Now that you have learned the background of our issue, we look forward to bringing you modified recipes pertaining to the foods that Leanne has found it hard to do without, experiences we encounter through this journey as Emma grows up, and resources that are helping us along the way.
While reading the book The Happiest Baby on the Block by Dr. Harvey Karp, we learned that the battle between an infant’s immune system and the foreign protein is often in the intestines, due to them being underdeveloped. The lining allows large, allergy-triggering molecules to enter the bloodstream, but over the first year of life, Emma’s intestinal lining gradually will become a better barrier to these proteins.
After making the initial changes improvements were seen; but with every step forward, we’d inadvertently take a step back. Take for instance, the first time my wife decided to implement soy into her diet, enjoying soy latte’s from Starbucks for two days this past winter. Those two days weren’t very good days for Emma Jane, which put another food on our list to avoid.
Leanne and I continually seek to improve our choices of the food and nutrition we give our bodies. This desire has only been amplified by the recent plus-one we’ve experienced. As a full-time college student myself – I attend Arizona State University, and will be graduating in May with a B.A. in English – and Leanne a member of the childcare/nanny profession, the two of us live on a tight budget, something that is not uncommon these days. Making an allergy-safe nutritional plan happen is no easy task, but hopefully sharing it on this blog will help you with your own experiences.
If you’re like Leanne, this is new and strange for you after living so many years eating the way you wanted to. It is easy to take for granted the foods we eat when we don’t have a reason to look closely at what they contain. Honestly, this situation of ours has forced us to eat healthier, which is something we always try to do but often fail at due to the hustle and bustle of daily life.
Now that you have learned the background of our issue, we look forward to bringing you modified recipes pertaining to the foods that Leanne has found it hard to do without, experiences we encounter through this journey as Emma grows up, and resources that are helping us along the way.
