Compartment 14B
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Dandelions spurned, allergist, paediatrician, Tulip Fest. Oh my. 2009-05-01 - 9:25 p.m. I promise to write more about Biscuit�s paediatrician appointment, his allergist appointment, and the experience of dropping off images for the gallery at the Canadian Tulip Festival � my first �show� � but first I have to relay this little story: As you all know, I love dandelions. So when I was pulling up to a corner the other day and looked out my window, my heart was warmed to see a father pushing his little girl in a stroller, and she was beaming at three early dandelions she had clutched in her hands. I smiled and thought about how I would have like to have been on foot with my camera so I could take a picture. I wish I could have driven off with this nice little vignette in my mind� but just as I was pulling away the girl�s mom walked up with a fierce scowl on her face, snatched the flowers out of her daughter�s hand and dashed them on the ground while contemptuously shouting, �Yucky!� So instead the last memory I�m left with is this little girl�s face crumpling from a radiant smile into bitter tears. Every time I think about it I want to hug my daughter. :: So Biscuit is mildly allergic to (drumroll please) milk, wheat, and eggs. Bleah. What�s left to feed this kid? No wonder he�s not enamoured with food. Further testing is required though, because the reactions were mild, and he�ll likely grow out of them if he is, in fact, allergic. In the meantime, I�ve been told that wheat is okay to give him but that we should avoid eggs because he vomits so much when he has them. Fair enough. I�ve also been told dairy is okay, but I�m not keen on that so much because, frankly, even though he keeps it down, when he gets milk on his skin it goes red and blotchy. I liked the allergist well enough in that I found him to be competent, knowledgeable and thorough. Really, I can�t ask for more. I didn�t find him to be particularly personable, but that would have only been icing. I also appreciated the fact that he wrote the order for the blood work but suggested we wait to see if the paediatrician wants to add anything to the tests so that our little Biscuit only needs to get stuck once. I suppose I�ll be phoning the paediatrician office sooner than the next appointment to see about adding to the lab order. :: The paediatrician was fantastic and not at all what I expected. I�d been told by my doctor (in a surprisingly warning tone) that he�d been doing this for a LONG time and was VERY experienced (subtext: he�s old). I expected him to be a bit old school and tell me to not let Biscuit drink water, to give up breastfeeding and co-sleeping, and to basically deprive my wee fellow until he accepted food and formula out of sheer hunger and desperation. I was pleasantly surprised when, instead, he made logical, reasonable suggestions that didn�t get my back up at all. He did suggest moving Biscuit to his own room but that was more to stop him snacking all night long and he felt that it might be too hard on everyone�s sleep if he was in bed with us when we denied him. He also suggested substituting water for breastfeeding during the night and trying to push the time between feedings during the day from 2-3 hours to 3-4 hours, with the idea being that we should try to establish a more mature feeding schedule of 3 larger meals and a couple of small snacks during the day. He also said we could be giving Biscuit wheat and juice at this point, whereas we were waiting until he was a year, on my family doctor�s suggestion. Following his advice we did make some gains in getting some food into the little man. Unfortunately we�ve backslid a bit since the allergist, since we�re now a bit freaked about feeding him a lot of stuff until we get the testing complete. The paediatrician also scheduled a �swallow study� to see if there�s anything going on to explain the hair-trigger gag reflex, and if Biscuit gains enough weight in the next few weeks he�ll cancel it. The allergist however, thinks we should probably carry through with it and make sure they watch for reflux because it may explain why he never wants more than a few spoonfuls of anything. We�ll see if the paediatrician agrees with him, since they seem to have formed a mutual-admiration society and each had nothing but good things to say about the other doctor. :: I dropped off my images at the Canadian Tulip Festival Art Gallery yesterday (a whole �nother post in the offing about that, by the way) and swung by today to see them up. It was very cool to see my stuff hanging there! Even more cool to hear people making appreciative comments to each other about them. Woo! I�ll be swinging by this weekend to drop off some business cards too. I�m trying to take shameless advantage of my good friend Jo to maybe get something simple but better-than-what�s-there-now up on my website so if people actually take my cards, and actually check my site out, there is more than just my Etsy page to see.
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