Babyternals

As stated in a previous post when I tried to give my son the rice cereal at four months old it made him very sick. Well, last week I tried him on stage 2 baby food, which most of those are some combination of vegetables and/or meats. I fed him a mixed vegetable with ham, which he liked a lot and ate almost the whole jar. I fed it to him around late afternoon.

Before I fed him I looked at the ingredients and it contained rice flour. I decided to go ahead and try it since it has been a couple of months since the whole rice cereal incidents. He did perfectly fine that evening. He played as usual and took a little nap. He didn’t show any signs of the baby food making him sick. I figured if I past the two hour mark after eating he would be fine and wouldn’t get sick. Well three or four hours had past and he was well. I gave him a bottle that night around 8:00 or so before I got ready to put him down for the night. I was thinking to myself, well maybe it was something in the rice cereal, like the soy, that was making him sick before and not the actual rice itself.

I began rocking him to sleep and he became very restless and a little fussy. He acted like maybe his stomach hurt a little but I wasn’t quite sure, because he does fight his sleep sometimes. So, I kept rocking him and singing to him and then all of a sudden every thing he had eaten from the bottle he just had to the baby food he had four to five hours previously came right up. He was vomiting the same way he had after having the rice cereal. I was a little surprised since it had been so long since he had eaten it, so I thought we were in the clear.  So my final conclusion is that he is definitely, without a shadow of a doubt now, allergic to rice and any form of rice.

Needless to say I felt horrible for giving it to him, but I needed to try the new food. After cleaning him up, as well as myself, me and my husband got him to sleep finally. We kept an eye on him all night just to make sure he didn’t get sick through the night. After he got that food up that one time he slept all night and was fine the next day.

I went through all the other baby food that I had and come to find out I had nine more jars that contained rice flour. I took them back to the store to swap it out for something he can eat, but do you know, most of the stage two foods that I looked at contain rice flour. If it is a meat and veggie combo it has rice flour in it. Most of the mixed vegetables also contain rice flour.

So for those parents who may be having this same problem, I just went ahead and bought a device to puree food. I pureed green beans and purple hull peas so far. He still is not fond of green beans but he kinda liked the peas. It’s just important to get the consistency right. I believe the green beans were a lot too soupy and the peas were a thick, but I added a little water to them and thinned them out. It’s a lot easier to thin something out than to thicken it up. I decided to do this because he is already tired of eating the same vegetables over and over and I would like to add meat to his diet. He shows interest in what we eat so I figure as long as we make it a consistency that he can he why not go ahead and give it to him.

I just wanted to continue to share my experience on this because it’s so important to recognize these kinds of things when they first appear because a food allery can cause much more harm than just vomitting it up. Children can die if the food allergy is severe enough and precautions are not taken to make sure they do not come in contact with those foods.