If you’re a parent, you already know that parenting requires a lot of sacrifices. Usually, that means money, sleep, a clean house, gym time, whatever. Sometimes it means moving to a safer neighborhood, eating healthier, quitting your job and becoming a stay-at-home-parent. And sometimes, it requires the ultimate sacrifice — elimination diets.
Ok, yes, I’m being facetious. But seriously, it’s hard! I’m so thankful that (so far) it seems to just be dairy, and not nuts or wheat or anything else, because it’s hard enough to eliminate dairy from your diet, especially when pizza is was a weekly indulgence. I tried a dairy-free pizza last weekend and, while it wasn’t terrible, I wasn’t a big fan. The vegan cheese was super sticky, and I’m not sure how often I’ll bother eating pizza if all vegan cheeses are like that.
And why am I giving up dairy, you ask? Oh, because we finally determined what may have been causing our daughter’s eczema. She’s almost 11 months old now, and has been getting solids for a few months now, slowly in case of reactions. She’d had a few contact rashes after certain foods, but we couldn’t find the common denominator. Two weeks ago, she had another contact rash, so I called my mom to find out what she’d eaten last. Turned out, she had eaten a few tiny bits of my dad’s ice cream shortly before I showed up. Sure enough, I looked back at all the other foods she’d had reactions to, and all of them had dairy. And since some of the dairy proteins make their way into breastmilk, that was probably the cause of her eczema.
It’s now been almost 2 weeks, which means my milk should be completely dairy-free soon, and now it’ll be about 2 weeks until it gets cleared out of my baby’s system. I haven’t noticed any eczema recently, so we’ll just have to keep watching to see if there’s anything else we should be eliminating. And if we’re lucky, she’ll outgrow this allergy in time, and she won’t have to live her life without experiencing the amazingness of non-vegan-cheese pizza. Although, if she has to not ever eat normal pizza again, at least she doesn’t already know how wonderful it is.
