Allergy-friendly Easter basket

I always struggle with how to handle food during the holidays. It wasn't until I had Ellie and we struggled so much with food intolerances and allergies that I realized how holidays really revolve around food. Like if you subtracted food, there's really no scaffolding to hold up a holiday.

When you don't eat gluten, dairy, sugar, or eggs holidays get tricky.  When you add in a salicylate sensitivity and Oral Allergy Syndrome, things get darn near impossible.

Over the years I feel like I've found a good balance of choosing one big food to highlight and celebrate, and then really focusing on the non-food aspects of the holiday, like family, tradition, connection, stories, faith, etc. At Thanksgiving Ellie and I made two pies together. At Christmastime we made cut-out cookies.

When Ellie was younger I could get away with skipping the food entirely. We've had treat-free Easters for several years in a row and it was no problem - Ellie didn't know any different and had lots of fun with her Easter baskets filled with new toys and books. But Ellie is almost five (what?!?) and is much more aware these days of how things work in the world and I knew she would be delighted to find some treats in her Easter basket this year.

And so that question comes up every year: what to put in the Easter basket? When I grew up I ate so. much. candy. on Easter. Obscene. Chocolate bunnies. Chocolate eggs. Those chocolate malt ball thingies. So much sugar. Whatever else came in the basket was secondary to the chocolate.

I wanted to echo those experiences - fun chocolate in Easter-y shapes, but avoid the sugar, the dairy and the chocolate itself, because chocolate is high in salicylates. I lucked upon a fantastic recipe for white chocolates on the Whole Life Nutrition blog (this site and their cookbooks are such great resources). Then I lucked upon these adorable chocolate molds on Amazon. Here's how they turned out:

Ellie was so delighted to find a bowlful of chocolates in her Easter basket in the morning. It was so worth the work of making them (at the 11th hour the night before, of course). And I was especially glad we made them when we were at an Easter brunch later in the day and Ellie couldn't eat the candy hidden in the eggs at the Easter egg hunt, but she could eat the candies I had brought along.

The rest of Ellie's Easter basket was a sweet collection of springtime finds I just have to share because they have been loved so much:

The Story of the Root Children by Sibylle Von Olfers 
Spring by Gerda Muller 
Little Butterflies Stained Glass Coloring Book

I also have started needle felting, so I made Ellie this sweet bunny egg:

It was so great to make an Easter basket that felt like a celebration and a special treat. I want to create warm memories for her and for holidays to feel like they are bursting full with love and happiness, not times where our dietary differences stand out more than anything else.

Allergies schmallergies

So much has changed since I last wrote an update about Ellie’s health. It’s absolutely amazing how dynamic the immune system is. I think a lot of people believe that if a child has an allergy, that allergy will be there for life. Or there are people who ask whether Ellie will grow out of her allergies. And my belief is that neither of those things are true. Food allergies are a living, breathing thing just like any illness. We can help heal them, or we can be complacent and live with them. Thankfully, our latest strategy has made huge strides in healing Ellie’s allergies.

First of all, we have made a ton of changes to Ellie’s treatment protocol.

• In May we doubled Ellie’s Ketotifen dose and we also switched from using Ketotifen tablets which we were getting from Canada to capsules of powder that we are able to get from a local compounding pharmacy. The Canadian tablets contained a tiny amount of lactose, and the new Ketotifen does not have any fillers, so I believe that change alone made a big difference. Ellie can’t do dairy, and a tiny amount of lactose twice a day builds up over time.
• In June we switched Ellie’s probiotic, on the theory that perhaps her gut was overpopulated with too few strains of good bacteria. 
• We also started an herbal protocol intended to support her immune system. 
• We added some other supplements to support her gut health and her immune system, including l-glutamine and bovine colostrum and I re-committed to actually giving her her fish oil and Vitamin D every day.

Somewhere in the mix of all of those changes, magic happened. Ellie is now eating most foods she’s had positive allergy tests for. She has had positive skin prick results for carrot, celery, parsley, bananas, walnuts, spinach and she is eating them all with no mention of tummy aches. No rash ... no nothing. Remember cinnamon? Yep, she’s eating cinnamon with no problem at all. That one really floored me.

When a grain-free diet isn’t working, look to salicylates

Over the course of the past month or so we’ve done some skin prick testing that has revealed some surprising food allergies for Ellie. She’s tested positive for allergies to: parsley, spinach, celery, carrots, lemon, grapefruit, walnuts, cinnamon, cod, bananas and oysters. Ellie’s allergist made a comment that perhaps Ellie was sensitive to salicylates, since many of the foods she tested positive for are high in salicylates. Some of the other foods are high in amines, another food chemical. It seems that often times if a person is sensitive to salicylates, or amines, they are also sensitive to the other.

I had never heard of salicylates and didn’t think much of the comment for days, feeling overwhelmed at the task of removing all these foods from Ellie’s already very limited diet. (Some foods had been removed long ago, but others were still a huge part of her diet.)

But time went on and Ellie continued having the same reaction to a variety of food. On two days I fed her raspberries, which she hadn’t had since last summer, and she became crazy hyperactive, had bright red flushed cheeks and was suddenly fussy and clingy. Another day I gave her some cherry tomatoes and the same reaction happened. I gave her some freeze-dried blueberries another day and – again – same reaction. I tried giving Ellie a homeopathic nasal spray of quercetin, which is a natural chemical found in foods and is believed to help support the immune system and suppress allergy symptoms. Well I found out the hard way that this type of quercetin is often sourced from parsley and citrus, which are very high in salicylates, and Ellie had the same. damn. reaction.

Fresh food allergy testing, going off allergy meds

Last week I took Ellie in to her allergist's office to do fresh food allergy testing. The way this works is a lot like traditional skin prick allergy testing. First the nurse used the food extracts, taking plastic pins that had been submerged in food extracts and then poking them into Ellie's back. With the extracts, Ellie had positive results for parsley and spinach. Because the results were so clear, we did not follow up with the fresh foods for parsley and spinach.

Next, came the fresh food testing. I had brought in a bunch of foods that I suspected for causing problems for Ellie. I focused on foods that cross-react with birch tree pollen since we've been suspecting Oral Allergy Syndrome, but I also threw in random foods my mama instincts told me were suspicious. It was actually very cute because Ellie was not keen on doing a second round of "pokes" but the nurse encouraged Ellie to poke the pins into the fruits and vegetables which really helped settle her down. With the fresh food testing Ellie tested positive for celery, carrots, lemon, grapefruit.

Months later, the coconut trial goes down in flames

So, here's what happened.

Here's what we know. Ellie can't digest fats well. She's on two supplement - digestive enzymes and bile salts - that help her body digest fats and even with that she cannot tolerate some foods high in saturated fat, like beef, ghee and coconut. No doctor has ever been able to tell us why this is so, but it is what it is and we work with it.

Knowing all that, and feeling really confident that Ellie had come a long way, we decided to trial coconut in November. I wrote that post, saying that coconut had gone amazing, on Nov. 22. Two days later my grandma had a stroke and two days after that we relocated up to my aunt's house to spend a week with my grandma in Hospice. Our live went into major upheaval mode and the next month included a funeral, family holiday parties, Christmas and a week-long vacation. And over the course of that time Ellie's health fell apart. Suddenly she wasn't sleeping through the night anymore. She was waking up screaming, having terrible reflux, crying and unable to tell me what was wrong, except that she had a tummy ache.

Coconut!

This past week has been dedicated to trialing coconut in Ellie's diet and I am super excited to say it passed with flying colors! Horray!

I can't believe it's been since June that we last trialed coconut. It didn't go well. For a long time we thought Ellie was sensitive to or allergic to coconut but through a looooong discovery process we realized she wasn't able to digest foods high in saturated fat.

Things have been crazy since then and it just was never the right time to try something so risky. But Ellie's been doing great and we decided to take the plunge.

Broken Open

There’s a book called Broken Open: How Difficult Times Can Help Us Grow. I haven’t read the book, but did see the author interviewed on TV years ago. The interview stuck with me, I suppose because I thought I had been through some difficult periods and come out of the experiences with positive changes. If only I knew then that my troubles would pale in comparison to what would come later. I now look back and honestly wonder what it was that was so hard about my life in my 20s.

I remember one thing the author said vividly. She said, “relax into the mystery of life as it is happening.” I look at that quote every day and try to let it inform my thoughts and actions.

Ellie is now 2 years and 3 months old and the first two years of her life have been by far the most challenging period of my life. Those two years brought an onslaught of challenges that just seemed to pile one on top of the other: difficult birth, extreme challenges establishing nursing, painful nursing because of Reynaud’s syndrome, failure to thrive, unsupportive doctors, colic, severe sleep depravation, lack of support, feeling alone, food allergies, a second, scarier round of failure to thrive, elimination diets, feeding therapy, learning to go dairy-free, soy-free, egg-free, gluten-free, citrus-free, coconut-free, then learning the SCD and GAPS diets, learning about gut disbyosis and all its health ramifications, learning how to be an advocate for a sick child, caring for a child experiencing a “healing crisis,” which at times felt worse than caring for a sick child and finally – and equally challenging – is learning how to transition to parenting a healthy child and letting go of the anxiety and militancy that accompanied the sick years.

A rough week

Day 68

Last week we trialed coconut, which we hadn't tried since the early days of SCD (it didn't go well). This time around it didn't go as badly (no hours-long screaming sessions in the middle of the night) but there were enough concerning symptoms that by day five I had to pull the plug. Ellie was frequently telling me her tummy hurt, her sleep was being affected and she developed a rash under her eyes and all over the trunk of her body.

I was so sad about this because I has really gotten my hopes up that coconut would be OK, which would make the diet so much easier. Especially snacks. It seems like so many GAPS-friendly snack recipes call for coconut or coconut oil. And doing GAPS without dairy or coconut is a real pain. There's something so sad to me about baking blueberry muffins with duck fat in them. :(

What our blood can tell us

Day 61

Recently we started seeing a nutrition counselor and one of the things she wanted us to do right away is get some blood tests done. Thankfully I was able to get them all done through our insurance and as the results trickled in, I forwarded them to our counselor. The results didn't say much to me, and didn't warrant an alarmed phone call or email from Ellie's doctor or mine, so I assumed there wasn't much news to be found. But late last week I sat down with our counselor and went over the results and what she shared with me was fascinating. I thought I'd share.

Days 26 & 27: A new game plan

The past few days I've been contemplating our GAPS journey thus far and looking for what's been working and what hasn't. I've come to terms with the fact that I need to let dairy go for now. After I ate goat yogurt two days in a row, Ellie was up for hours that third night with a tummy ache. So I'm letting it go. It's hard. Yogurt would be a great source of probiotics and calories for us, but it's not in the cards. I'm tabling all dairy for 3-4 weeks and then will try again, this time strictly following the protocol for starting whey on Intro, rather than jumping into eating amounts of yogurt that had been fine for us pre-Intro.

If I could go back and do things over again, I would not have trialed ghee. Ellie was showing a lot of progress just before that and we have still not recovered from the setback. It is a big lesson: be patient. Be OK with just hunkering down even in the middle of Intro for a little while if things are going well. I am feeling a lot more cautious with risky foods now. For example, one of the next things we should introduce is avocado and Ellie reacts to avocado (I think it is somehow related to her citrus allergy) so we're skipping it for now.