One Week Later...

The last week has seen some big changes around my house. After the first bout of parental panic over the fact that soy is in everything, my husband and I decided we would cut it out as much as practically possible. This means no soy milk, soy sauce, tofu, deli meat or meat products with fillers, etc, around the house. I am trying cook and use products that don't contain soy protein as much as possible. If, however, Liam should have a little bit of soy in a cookie, or margarine, outside of the house, we're not going to worry about it. We'll try to avoid it as much as we can, but you can't always catch everything. The result of our eliminating soy at home has already yielded results that bring equal parts relief and disappointment. Liam's skin has started clearing up. This is huge, because since he was about three months old my son has had terrible eczema. At the worst he would be covered in rashes, cracked skin, open sores from scratching and hives from head to toe. Lately he's had fissures, peeling skin and swelling located mainly on his hands and feet. His behaviour has done a complete 180 as his skin heals, and that just goes to show how much this stuff affects everything.

We are relieved to see Liam's skin clear up, and disappointed that these diet changes are probably going to be permanent ones, for now at least. On Monday my mum and I took Liam to get the RAST (also known as IgE) blood test done. After someone tests positive to having an allergy in a skin prick test, the RAST is used to look for antibodies to those allergens. The more antibodies they find relating to a specific allergen, the worse the allergy is. Liam's allergist wants to know how severe the shellfish and soy allergies are since soy is a rarer one in general, and shellfish is rare in children. We'll have a better idea, in about three weeks, as to how much we have to watch what goes into Liam's little mouth. In the mean time, I get to have fun putting family meals together around two separate sets of food restrictions. I'm actually looking forward to the challenge. Next week I should have at least a couple of recipes to post, and I'll rate them on ease of use and how they were received. My husband is my primary guinea pig for taste, since the kids will eat almost anything.