I hope you choke on the words

Ugh, this has been a crappy couple of days.  But first, the good - BabyT had her 9-month checkup yesterday and is growing well - 23lbs 8oz.  She's apparently now in the 90-95th percentile for height, which is music to this short mama's ears.  I know that's no indication she'll actually be tall later, but it's nice to hear.  (Though I'm not sure how accurate baby length measurements are - T was pretty wiggly.)

But then we also learned that T is low on iron, which means that I'm probably *really* low since she's still getting most of her calories from nursing.  (side note:  hooray for 9 months of breastfeeding!)  So she needs to take this icky tasting iron supplement, with a yummy vitamin C supplement to mask the taste and enhance absorption.  We'll see how that goes.  Giving her liquid antibiotics in her milk didn't really work for us a few months ago - by the end of it, she was *very* wary of drinking out of the bottle. 

And then the doctor mentioned that she was a little concerned that T wasn't trying to pull up to standing yet.  My mama intuition (such as it is) isn't actually too worried about it, given T's size, since that's a lot of weight to try to move, and the fact that she's doing fine otherwise (feeding herself, sitting up like a champ, social and smiley, even with strangers).  But of course there are the inevitable comparisons to other babies we know that are her age, and they're all mobile.  So if she doesn't start pulling up by 11 months, we need to go somewhere to get her evaluated.  Ick. 

2 months is pretty much an eternity in BabyT-time, though.  2 months ago, she was barely eating anything I'd put in front of her, and now she's an expert at picking up and getting even little pieces of stuff in her mouth, including the beans from the spicy black bean soup I made.  2 months ago, she still needed some support to sit up and would often flop over.  Now she can sit up with no support, lean waaaay over to get a toy that's out of reach, and comfortably sit for 30 min+ to play with her toys.

Given that, I think, in 2 months she'll be in good shape.  The doctor pointed out that she's already using her 'pincer grip' to grab things.  I thought she was still working on it, so that's good news.  Which means we might be able to break out the Cheerios - yippee!

And speaking of food, I'm now running into what is probably the first of many times I live to eat my words with respect to raising a kid.  The advice I've read and gotten from our doctor on introducing solids to babies advocates a very slow approach - introducing a new food only every couple of days, and starting with just individual fruits and vegetables, then rice, then other grains, then yogurt and cheese, etc.  So if you follow the recommendations, it would be nearly forever before your baby could eat complicated table foods. 

When T was around 2 months old, I read a book by a local Seattle food writer called Hungry Monkey: A Food-Loving Father's Quest to Raise an Adventurous Eater.  It was a very entertaining read, and got me excited to introduce T to "real food". 

Since we have no family history of food allergies, I figured after we got through some of the first fruits and veggies, and a few grains without incident, we'd just be able to go hog wild on the rest and start feeding her what we eat. I was pretty disdainful of the uber-careful approach to introducing things. Especially after yesterday's doctor's appointment, where she told us we should be getting to a point where T should be eating 3 meals a day around the time she turns one.

And that all came to a screeching halt today. I brought a yoBaby yogurt with us to lunch so we could feed it to T while we ate. She had a few spoonfuls, and once we cleaned her up, her mouth and hands turned a very bright red, which then started spreading up to her ears. By the time we got home, there were little bumps and she was getting itchy.

This was her third yogurt experience, and I did notice the first two times, that she got a little bit red around the mouth. Plus there was the vomiting incident with the tomato soup (which had cream in it). But I wasn't sure at those times whether there was really a correlation. This was REALLY obvious.

She wasn't having any other issues (no breathing problems, thankfully!) but I figured I should call the doctor just in case. And of course we didn't have any baby Benadryl in the house either. Sigh. The nurse who returned my call said their diagnostic protocols said we needed to go to the ER at Children's Hospital because her reaction was so immediate after eating the yogurt and that we needed to call 911 *if* she started having any breathing issues.

Not exactly calming advice - I was pretty sure she was fine, since she had just fallen asleep and the rash was already fading. But it's not something I wanted to take a chance on, so I woke her up and we drove over the lake to the ER.

By this time the rash had totally faded, and T was smiling at all the nurses. Our ER experience was surprisingly quick, and we got sent home with a prescription for an Epi-pen (but the doctor said it would be very unlikely we'd ever need it) and a recommendation to *not* give her any more dairy until after her first birthday. He mentioned that allergy testing was pretty unreliable for babies, so we might just need to try dairy again after 1 and see if she's outgrown the reaction. He also suggested that we go a lot slower with introducing solid foods - one at a time, and wait several days to make sure she's tolerating them.

So much for eating what we eat. And I'll have to figure out a cupcake recipe for her birthday that has no dairy in it. And now it sounds like I'll need to put more effort into pumping milk for her, to make sure we don't run out of our frozen supply, since milk-based formula is not an option anymore.

In the grand scheme of things, none of this is a big deal. Lots of people have bigger issues. And Chublet is still healthy and happy, so that's really what matters. But this was a tiny little black rain cloud over our otherwise blissful existence.

So fingers crossed that she outgrows the milk intolerance, and in the next couple of months she gets moving, and that baby and mama get our iron levels back up. Hooray for babies!