Becoming Allergy Parents: Part 1. It seemed like all my friend’s babies were sleeping through the night without any trouble, and here I was, hoping for even two hours of sleep at a time. “Let her cry through it,” my friends would say. But I knew something was wrong. I knew her pain and discomfort cry. I wasn’t going to let her just cry through that.
The first few months of Natalie’s life were TOUGH.
We knew something was wrong, but we couldn’t figure out what it was.
Night after night, we’d be up for hours with her as she cried and cried. I’d try nursing her, giving her Gripe Water, holding her, laying her down, doing stomach massages and moving her legs in circles… Hilariously enough, the only thing that calmed her was laying her on her changing table. For some reason, she loved that. It was her safe place.
Within a few months, her skin started peeling and cracking. Eczema, the doctor said. It crawled all over her body, even her face, covering her in itchy, red, sometimes oozing spots.
We tried medication and ointments of all kinds (shea butter, coconut oil, steroids, Vaseline, baking soda baths, etc., etc., etc…), but her skin didn’t get better.
Eventually a friend suggested Aveeno Eczema Therapy Cream & Oatmeal Bath, and my mother-in-law recommended we change our laundry detergent. Those things made a big difference, and we’ve continued to use those new products, but they still didn’t solve the problem either.
Our daughter still woke up itching all night long.
Some nights I’d be up with her from 12am-5am straight. Some days I was so tired and weak I feared I might drop her, so I’d lay her down and call up my mom, asking for a grandma visit.
It seemed like all my friend’s babies were sleeping through the night without any trouble, and here I was, hoping for even two hours of sleep at a time. “Let her cry through it,” my friends would say. But I knew something was wrong. I knew her pain and discomfort cry. She’d been putting herself to sleep on her own, without me in the room, since she was 3 months old. But when she woke up at night, something was wrong. I wasn’t going to let her just cry through that.
A few friends suggested that dairy might be the culprit, but at first, I just couldn’t give up cheese.
I lived on dairy, and as a breastfeeding mama, I was always hungry. I had full-fat plain Greek yogurt each morning for breakfast, sometimes cottage cheese as a snack, cheese with my lunch, cheese with my dinner, and sometimes ice cream at night.
But I finally asked myself, “Would you rather sleep or eat cheese?” The answer was clear.
I decided to cut cheese out of my diet and see what happened. Honestly, I wasn’t too hopeful. I’m gluten intolerant (self-diagnosed), but no one in my family has actual food allergies.
The pediatrician recommended cutting eggs out of my diet along with dairy, since those are two common culprits behind eczema. So I did.
And that’s when things started to improve. I started getting 3-4 hour blocks of sleep at night! There were a few nights where she even went 6-7 hours at a time! I could HARDLY BELIEVE IT. It felt like heaven on earth, absolute utopia!
Until…we started introducing solids. That’s when I had the scariest experience of my life.
Click here to read the next leg of our allergy journey: The Epipen Incident.
XOXO,
That Allergy Mama
That Allergy Mama 