Monday, January 19, 2009

allergy update

Here's what we found out from our pediatrician last week:

Alex's milk allergy is "a blip on the radar", in the words of the pediatrician. Most babies with a milk allergy outgrow it by their first birthday, and it appears that Alex is doing that. Wonderful!

A true (life-threatening) milk allergy is 100 or above. Alex is 0.43, making his allergy very mild. We've started giving him some foods with dairy, but not straight milk. His pediatrician said we can do that next month.

Alex enjoyed some of the delicious mint chocolate chip pie at cousin Joshua's birthday party yesterday. He begged & begged for more, and we've seen no ill effects from that yet...guess he handled the heavy cream in that pie without any trouble!

The allergy testing covered the 7 most common children's allergies, and we learned something that surprised us: Alex is allergic to peanuts!

Again, it's not a horrible allergy, but he's classified in the "moderate" category. A life-threatening peanut allergy is 30. Alex is 1.32, meaning that peanuts are more likely to cause hives/eczema than milk is! We had no clue. So, no peanut products of any kind for Alex until he's at least 2 years old.

If these are our biggest struggles with Alex, we are blessed. Very, very blessed.

3 comments:

Emma Hamstra said...

I'm so thankful he doesn't have the bad milk allergy. I know it's been hard for you guys and I know I've had an education through you of things I never knew had milk in them. Now, on to a bowl of ice cream!! :)

Susie said...

So glad to hear that! The peanut thing is scary too! But good to be on top of that so you can watch out for that. Les' sister is HIGHLY allergic to NUTS...so we try to watch out for that at resturants when we go out together...lots of breadings on fish and chicken dishes have them and don't list it on the menu! Good luck with that..you guys are good parents to baby Alex, I guess I'll have to start calling him Big Brother Alex, since he technically isn't the baby anymore! Hope you are feeling well!

Sara said...

I'm so glad you guys had the allergy testing done and I'm even happier that it didn't find anything worse. The birthday pictures are a hoot, I love the blue icing in his hair!