How it began (Good-bye, milk!)

Lily was just about a month old when I started noticing some unsightly contents in her diaper. Since it's relevant, and since as the mom of a baby, my life largely revolves around poop, I'll share details: green, mucousy, and streaked with blood. They say that breastfed baby poop can come in a rainbow of colors, depending upon what the mom eats, but I must have read somewhere that these particular colors were possible signs of a milk allergy, so I brought it up to our pediatrician at Lily's one-month checkup.

Milk protein allergy, I was told, is the most common cause of blood in infants' stools, and after a hemoccult test confirmed that Lily's dirty business was not all right, the pediatrician suggested I eliminate all dairy from my diet. The other option would have been to try a hypoallergenic formula. (According to the pediatrician, roughly 50% of milk-allergic infants are also soy-allergic, so my ped's office doesn't bother with soy formula.)

I should clarify that I am not anti-formula. I just really like nursing my babies. My first was a preemie, so the benefits of breastfeeding were pretty strongly indoctrinated to me during his NICU stay, and once you get going, nursing really just gets easier. I should add that I also cosleep, and thanks to this, I have no idea if/when/how often my infant wakes during the night b/c I can nurse in my sleep. And I do love my sleep. So for these reasons and more, I choose to breastfeed.

But I digress.

Infants can't be accurately tested for food allergies. The only real way to diagnose them is by eliminating the offender and eliminating the symptom. I was told that it could take up to four weeks to see Lily's allergy symptoms completely cleared up... two weeks for the milk proteins to be eliminated from my system and another two weeks to get out of hers.

I said goodbye to ice cream, butter, cheese, yogurt, and anything that contained casein or whey (both forms of cow's milk protein). It might lend some perspective to how significant this change was for me if I explain that I had up until that day probably eaten ice cream every single day during the preceding year. (Ice cream ranks only beneath sleep on my list of favorite things.)

Anyway, I started reading food labels, and it turns out milk is in a lot of stuff you wouldn't expect. Hot dogs, margarine... it's a pretty long list.

Two weeks later, Lily wasn't doing much better, but her pediatrician said to give it the full four weeks, so the dairy-free experiment persisted.