Claire,

Thank you so much for that! I am sure I will learn lots at that site.

My son had a physical recently. He has not eaten the foods he was found to have delayed allergies to through IgG testing since May. His serum eosinophils have fallen into range (they were elevated in the past). He has grown 2 inches but not gained any weight. He is doing quite well, except for the struggles of being a 12 year old kid on a gluten, dairy, soy, egg, legume, nut, citrus free diet. We have tried to reintroduce dairy on a couple of occasions and it has resulted in too many GI symptoms so he is not ready for that yet.

--Judy

Hi Judy,

I quite enjoy reading your updates. It's helps phenomenally to hear from other Moms going through this.

Something I've noticed... all the Moms that I talk to... have sons. What's up with that? Do you know any girls who have this issue? I know there's that girl that was on Montel but haven't seen any others. Is it 'largly' a 'boy issue'?

We didn't do testing (because I felt that ds's body had 'testing fatigue' from all the testing they did in the first two years of his life ). So, of course many know that we did our ted (total elimination diet) and found that the lily family and the nightshade family and corn were all out for him (not to mention a lot of starch and refined sugar).

(About?) two years ago we started allowing things in and sometimes had to back up again. However, five years from our ted he, one of his favourite things to make is salsa and eat it with corn chips... and he does just fine. His bone growth is still good (we can tell by the way he's growing too tall for his pants - before our ted, he wore the same pants for two years). He is aaalmoooost into a pant that is equal to his age... finally... sigh...

Side note: Even though he doesn't have an 'apparent' reaction to dairy... when I fed him a blob of store bought ice cream for a week, he ended up with a tummy ache that lasted 3 weeks. It didn't clear until we did a (sped up) ted with him again... starting with chicken soup broth, graduating to SCD... toward multi-things free... and then back to where we are now - originally this process took about two years... this time it took about 2 or 3 weeks. (dairy and refined sugar? hmmm)

(still issues with waistband size though... however, as he gets older, the waistband issue is getting easier to deal with because other kids who are bigger around the waist must start to get slimmer toward the age of ten... I'm guessing because he's still very thin and lightweight.)

Weight gain?... Well, we do have some but we don't weigh him more often than once or twice a year because I don't want him to get a 'complex' about something that he obviously has no control over... So, when we do weigh him, we celebrate whatever gain there was and confirm to him that he's doing an awesome job in making sure that he eats foods that are not making him feel sick.

I hum and haw about another blood test. I itch to know what's going on there but don't want to give in because all of those other blood tests sure didn't help us get him growing... sigh...

I wish someone had a magical crystal ball to tell me what to do next.

I will be interested to hear, now that you've got your ds's e's down... whether he will gain weight within the next 6 months to a year.

Last note: One or two years in, we glutened the kids with chick feed for about six weeks (playing with the chicks everyday) and both stopped growing. We got rid of all bird food (we feed our girls cooked rice/popcorn from the kitchen and mostly meat/veggie table scraps) and the kids' growth took off again. Now, looking at their growth charts, those growth stoppages show up as a downward 'blip' (like on a heart monitor), then the line goes back to where they left off before they were glutened and continues on in a steady fashion once again.

I guess I just wanted to add that so that parents aren't *too* fearful in 'trying' to expand their children's diet (with a gluten exception - as we don't test that after that one blip - and they weren't even 'ingesting' the gluten - persay). Just be as vigilant as you can and watch the charts. If you see a downward swing in growth chart data, take it in stride and do what you can to get it back up... and take notes.