Mommy's Turn!

Audree and Mommy went for another appointment to the allergy elimination specialist, mommy's first, in order to treat me and attempt to prevent allergies in little one. I'm not sure if everyone has the same problem, but I also tested problematic for the first four items.... eggs, calcium, vitamin B complex and sugars. I'm interested to see how Mich does when Audree and I are all finished up. I was treated for eggs today, a little more in-depth than treatments for a baby or toddler.... never knew I had a problem with eggs or chicken..hmmm. I'm debating on whether or not to double up on my treatments for the next 6 weeks and resume Audree's in March after baby's born or just do one for each of us each week or what....unfortunately nothing is free and my treatments will cost more than hers. We'll see.... Audree was given a booster treatment for milk and her normal treatments have taken a temporarily different route to treat her for those things that cause her asthma to go crazy as it seems her pet allergies are getting worse... doesn't matter how long ago the pet was around. Since cats are the worst, we started with cats today. I imagine next time, as long as her treatment for cats hold, will be dogs. I also plan to ask for treatments for grass, trees, mold and dust mites. With spring on it's way, I'm hoping we'll stop the attacks before they can start!!

We had a wonderful Christmas this year, very busy. I hope you all had a great one too! Of course Audree made out like a bandit!! But I wouldn't have expected anything else... she is very loved and everyone loves to spoil her. :-)

Everything with baby is coming along wonderfully....though I'm absolutely exhausted by the time we get Audree down for bed. Thank goodness for Mich!! Dr. says everything is on target, I'm very lucky or just smarter this time and very little swelling in my ankles so far, if any at all and keeping the false contractions in check. I go in next week for another checkup, then up to every week or twice a week depending on how things are progressing. Audree loves going with us to the appointments. She gets to hear the baby's heart beat and enjoys playing with the Dr's chair and other fun stuff while we wait.

Yes... I know!

It's been a while. Life has been busy and computer time not so much. So before i forget, since I know I won't be on here again in the next few days...

MERRY CHRISTMAS!!!

We're in the last few weeks until baby arrives... only 9 weeks left until baby's estimated due date. Will she come early, on time, or a little late.. who knows! Dr. says I'm right on schedule and thankfully it has been an uneventful pregnancy, with the exception of lost sleep and some aches and pains. But whoever said being pregnant was easy? We're working on our to-do list to make sure we're ready for whenever she decides to arrive. Michael has started demo and remodel on the new room we are building for Audree, so he's keeping really busy.

Audree is changing daily. She cracks me up every day with something new. Yesterday I was organizing some of her toys and would hand her something and ask her to put it away, her response was "oh thank you, that's so sweet." That surprised me and I was laughing so hard at the way she said it, I was almost in tears. This afternoon we finally got to go outside for a bit... it's just been too cold, but I promised her we would go play in the snow... I also had an alterior motive... trying to wear her out enough for her to take a nap for the first time this week... but no success. Oh well. She's now counting all the way to 30 and singing the ABC's without missing a letter, all by herself. Everyone is always amazed that she can do that....but i'm not, she's a smart little girl!.... or as she says... super girl! She loves to sing. Her favorite song right now is frosty the snowman... "frosty no-man, jolly happy soul, copopoppop, button nose, eyes, nose..." I love her special rendition.... always sure to bring a smile!

Nothing new to report on the progress of her allergy elmination appointments. I think that even Dr. is getting a little frustrated that we're not seeing faster results. She was treated for 4 different things today, though only two appointments. We had the normal treatments and what she calls boosters for both milk and wheat, which she is going to start doing with Audree. I tried giving her wheat this week and did not have such good results. Thinking it could have been something else, i was going to let her system clear out and try again next week. I mentioned it to Dr. Tess and she checked wheat again.... the results were ok, but when she tested to see if Audree would need more treatments for wheat, it came back that she would need 8 treatments for wheat and at least 15 for milk. Oh boy! Thankfully she can give her a booster, in which she said she can trick the body into thinking it's getting all 8 or 9 treatments or as many as Audree's system will allow at a time, we got 8 for wheat today and 9 for milk, along with working on the digestive system and salt.

This is the last double apointment day for Audree for a few months though, it's time to get mommy in there to treat baby before she's born. Tess can treat me and at the same time treat the baby of any potential allergies, something she recommends doing in the third trimester. So we'll still have two appointments, but one for mommy and one for Audree. Of course if she's doing boosters on Audree, it'll be like she's still having two appointments. :-)

Two more appointments down....

We had our two weekly appointments today. Audree was retested for milk and failed, so she was retreated for milk. She was also tested for iron, Vitamin A, minerals and salt.... of course all those failed, so she was also treated for iron today.

The specialist rechecked her a little while later and everything held, but she wanted to check on a few more things related to milk, so she checked hormones and grass. Hormones were just fine, but grass also failed. She thinks Audree might have a problem with the grass that cows eat... which in turn causes her to have problems with milk. It does make sense to me, I can't take her into freshly mowed grass because she ends up getting really wheezy and/or having an asthma attack....which is the same reaction she has with cats. I have feeling our first treatment next week will be grass and as long as milk holds through the week, the 2nd should be Vitamin A.

It's turning out to be a much longer process than we all anticipated.... but in the long run we will have a much healthier little girl. Come January I'll have to knock her treatments back to once a week instead of twice because we plan on getting me in before the baby is born and hopefully treating anything that could arise with little Jellybean before we see her face in February. I can't believe it's getting so close already.

Update on Yearly allergy test

Audree had her yearly allergy test with the allergist's office today. After sitting there for 2.5 hours we got some good news.....as of today she is no longer allergic to barley, oat and strawberries and only moderately allergic to soy and rye. I was told to introduce those two in small amounts and see how she does and of course introduce the others one at a time to make sure her system doesn't go into overload. For any of you that look at ingredients on a consistent basis, you know that allowing barley, oats, rye and soy opens up a ton of foods!! I'm so excited!! I will be introducing each one of them during the coming weeks.

We didn't do the blood test, we did the skin prick test, so I got to see just how reactive she is to some of these foods. Milk, eggs, peanuts and cats produced gigantic hives! Needless to say she is very allergic to them. I requested sesame and coconut.. she has a pretty good reaction to sesame, but nothing to coconut and she was slightly reactive to wheat and dogs.

We will continue to see the allergy elimination specialist and I have some good results I can present to her at our next appointment. She said the blood test would not be a good indicator because the antibodies can still remain in her system for months afterwards, but this test is a good indicator of anything that she's grown out of or that has been cleared. :-)

saying goodbye to milk allergy

We're continuing to do 2 appointments with "Dr. Tess" as Audree calls her for Audree's allergy clearing. Friday our first session was for sugar (all sugars) and our second session was for dairy! Woohoo! She did a mix of milk, yogurt, cheese, albumin, casein and whey. We haven't done any challenges with the dairy yet. I think all I'm willing to try at this point is kissing her after I eat something with milk in it. The combination of Audree and milk scares me.

We have our appointment with the allergist next week also....which I made over two months ago. I'll have her tested for a variety of things to determine where we stand and if anything crept in that maybe we're not aware of, we've been noticing a problem with cats and dogs lately.. hopefully those can be taken care of soon with her NAET treatments, but I don't expect it to be in the next few weeks. However, I may request the scratch test for milk and eggs.... reason being is that according to the specialist, the antibodies, though unreactive, can remain in her system for several months after she is cleared of the allergy and will still show up on the blood tests as being a problem. I'm praying that everything will miraculously cleared out of her system anyway.

Audree is getting so big. She is saying things now that just amaze us... some things we didn't think she'd ever heard before, but apparently picked them up somewhere. Her latest is "good morning." Someone said that to her Friday morning at her appointment and for the rest of the day she told everybody "good morning." Of course she loves telling everybody "happy birthday!" I can't wait until her birthday to see what she does... she'll never stop saying it then! hehe

Currently working on potty training. It's not been too difficult, taking her a few accidents to figure out, but she's getting there. I'm not ready to trust her away from the house without a diaper or pull-up yet though!

(picture - Audree showing off her stuff as an '80s girl for Halloween)

Update on appointments 4 & 5

Ok, so clearing Audree's allergies is not as easy as it has been for most people and is going to take a little more work than we hoped. I mentioned the results of our egg challenge to the gal and she said it was rare to need to go as far as we are with egg, but it's still very doable. She had one case before that is similar to Audrees, but I think her problem was with milk. It ended up being a combination of grass and milk... of course cows eat grass!

Instead of trying to figure out the eggs right now.. or milk... she said the best thing to do is strengthen Audree's immune system first and then go back and check the foods. Today we did treatments for vitamin B complex and vitamin C. Next week will probably be sugars and iron. She said by the way things are going, Audree's system appears to be very sensitive.

We may not be able to have that special birthday cake for her this year that I was really hoping for as her birthday is in a month, but I will be counting on it for next year!

No eggs :-(

Just an update..... We challenged eggs this last weekend and they failed again. A little frustrating, but now I have more questions. We'll see how her appointments on Friday go.

Appointments #2

We ended up with 2 appointments this morning instead of just one. Audree was rechecked to see if being cleared for eggs held and it did! However we brought up the fact that her skin broke out when we touched them to her face, but had no problems when we put it on her tongue. So she checked eggs with skin and eggs with all her organs, especially her digestive tract. Her organs were fine at accepting the eggs, but skin was another story. So she did a combination treatment and did inflammation/skin/eggs. Sounds weird, I know, but it's how they do it. I am to re-challenge eggs this weekend, same as before, scrambled eggs on her skin and her tongue, if all looks good, since Audree has never seen an egg before and will most likely push it away, I'll make some cookies or other baked good with eggs in it instead of an egg replacer. I'm excited to try it!

Half an hour later we went in and had her rechecked to see if the egg treatment held, and of course it did. The 2nd round is calcium...in this round we are working on clearing her dairy allergy. Hallelujah! This is the one that always scares me the most for her to be around. It might take more than one visit as eggs did, but it might not. We'll see... I'm not going to challenge this one on my own though... I will most likely wait until her blood tests are done in a couple weeks as anaphlyaxis is nothing to mess around with.

First NAET appointment

We had our first appointment today. She did some basic muscle testing through use of a "surrogate"... me. She only tested a few things to start with...very basic nutrients- egg, vitamin c, calcium, B complex and sugars.. but they all came up as problematic. Instead of treating the individual foods, they start with nutrients and work from there since that usually clears up the food problems. Then if the foods are still problems, they work on the individual foods. What the tests showed was that Audree has problems absorbing and digesting these nutrients. There are many, many more, and they start off by treating 10 basic nutrients, but these were just what she worked with today.

Egg is self explanatory--- vitamin c - this could be her problem with strawberries----calcium- dairy of course, oats, etc--- B Vitamin complex- grains (wheat, rye, barley, oat), soy-----sugar is self explanatory also.

Today she worked on clearing Audree's egg allergy...now it could take more than one treatment as her last blood test indicated she could be in the anaphylactic range with eggs or there could be a nutrient in eggs that she has problems with. I attempted to give her some scrambled eggs during dinner... of course my picky 2yr old wouldn't put it in her mouth since eggs are totally foreign to her, she's never had them. I put some on her skin, then tried to at least get it on her tongue. She had a slight outward reaction, her skin got a little red and swelled at the site, but her tongue did not. That appeared promising.

We'll see what happens... we are going back for another appointment on Friday and I will mention this to her. I'll give it a fair shot and see how her actual blood test goes at the beginning of November when we see the allergist again. If the blood test proves that her allergies are being eliminated and lessened, we'll keep going. I would love to make a birthday cake with wheat and eggs this year! :-)

If you're curious about NAET.. here's a website that explains what heppens. Sounds totally weird... I know....but I've heard wonderful success stories. :0) http://cherokeethc.com/naet.html

Totally amazed!!

Now that we know for sure that baby Jelly Bean is a girl, I got the itch to go through all the clothes we've had for Audree (I've kept everything) and organize them by size. I am totally amazed that someone so small and so young could have sooooo many clothes and I don't think Mich & I bought even 1/4 of them! We are very blessed. Most of them I remember, some I do not, maybe because there were some we recieved after she outgrew them ... but I can say that the new baby definitely doesn't need any clothes! :-)