So, yesterday we had our first allergic reaction. Malina is fine and it was a mild one. It might not have been food related either, but we are going to be safe here and take the day off from solids before continuing probably tomorrow.
For those wondering, this was the timeline we had.
Malina ate breakfast @8:20am
10:30am- We go out to grocery store and she chews on her wrap that I wear her in, as well as the car seat strap covers, and her car seat toy.
11:45am. We get back home and I notice a red spot on her neck above her shoulder and under the corner of her jaw. It looks like it might be a big bite but I check the rest of her and she seems fine. I also take her temperature and it comes back normal.
Spot on neck
2:30pm Malina wakes up from a nap and I can see that she has broken out with an eczema rash all over her chin, upper lip, and neck.
Eczema rash on mouth
Over the next five hours the rash gets redder and then slowly goes away until it is gone around 8pm.
Checking her this morning showed that she had completely cleared up but we are being cautious and taking a break from solids today.
The chart I keep handy about allergic reactions is as follows. The chart is a guideline and is not medical advice or meant to replace medical advice.
It’s also important to listen to baby and what you feel is right. There were a few moments when the rash first showed up that I considered going to a walk in clinic, but Malina was fine and so I watched and waited. That might not be the case if it happened again and I might do things differently. But I trusted myself and listened to her.
So back to what happened.
If this was a reaction to the food it was super delayed. That does not mean it can’t be the food but there are too many other things to rule it out one way or another. Malina started using a new lotion on Wednesday. I wore a face cream yesterday to help with my eye. There are too many factors, so taking a break will help and when we start again on Saturday we will focus on dairy to see if it happens again.
This type of eczema rash happens a lot in my family to the babies and kids. It is usually a reaction to acidic foods getting on the skin. Yogurt is acidic and it definitely got everywhere that Malina got her rash. So moving forwards I’ll pay extra attention to acidic foods and skin exposure.
Everyday is a learning experience with a baby. There is so much you plan for and do as preventatives but there is nothing all those things can do when you are faced with a problem. Once we figure out what caused her reaction we plan to take that info to her doctor and go from there. Hindsight is always 20/20 and with a baby it stings all the more. Still it’s important to remember that I am doing my best and that I need to trust myself because she trusts me.
So you remember too, you are doing great and you’ve got this!
I did meal prep last night! Yay! I managed to set up everything for this morning and all I had to do was go put the zucchini in the oven when I got up. Easy. I guess I should tell you what I made for today though.
So I’ve heard a bunch of mamas, across several groups that I am in, say they made egg salad without mayonnaise and used avocado as the replacement. Sounded interesting and weird. Two things I can totally get behind if it works out, and did it ever. No one ever seems to provide recipes for this stuff though, so here is what I did in case anyone wants to give it a shot.
1/2 avocado, nice and ripe and diced up
2 hard boiled eggs, diced how you like it
1/2 tsp of dill
1/2 tsp of granulated garlic
You just mix everything together with a fork and you get a nice chunky consistency that tastes divine.
I will have to make this for me next time and put it on some buttered toast. Avocado toast has a new challenger in the arena of topping combinations. It would probably do amazing with some salt or lemon mixed in as well, but that is neither here or now since this is for Malina.
So the oven would have preheated when the timer for it went off (but we got up early) so I went out to toss my pan of breaded zucchini from the fridge into the oven and started it up.
Malina did her morning ritual and then we were sitting down and eating by 8 am.
So we have breaded baked zucchini, avocado egg salad, and I tossed a could slices of regular avocado on the plate just to see how she handled it. I was ready for today to be messy, but today is also bath day so I figured what ever.
Mama’s and Malina’s plates.
So the first thing Malina reaches for is the avocado. I think I actually cut the slice a little too thick for her to handle but the other slice was too thin and became insta mush. She was not impressed by the avocado unfortunately, which I’m starting to think is a texture thing as she hasn’t really been into anything ‘slimy’. Will have to consider than in the future.
Eating avocado.
The next thing she tried to mess with was the avocado egg salad. It ended up everywhere but her mouth so I brought in our trusty friend, the spoon.
With BLW they don’t seem to like utensils until Baby is older. This stems from an idea that spoon feeding is part of traditional weaning and has no place in BLW. I get the problem stemming from possible ‘over feeding’ when someone spoon feeds the baby, but I think it’s easy to avoid doing that. Something that does occasionally seem acceptable is offering a pre-loaded spoon of food. But even this method expects the spoon to just be laid on the table for baby to pick up on their own. This seems problematic to me because baby doesn’t know how to use a spoon first off, then it’s more of a weapon (dart) or mess maker (trebuchet) offered in this way, and finally I don’t want her to get frustrated while she’s eating anymore than necessary.
So I load up the spoon with our avocado mixture and hand it to her. Also, I want everyone to know that Malina has been practicing with spoons without food for almost a month now. We’ve also encouraged her to hold it and put it in her mouth a certain way. So, this was not her first time using a spoon.
Using the spoon.
I also want to take a moment to add a video clip of Malina gagging. I was already recording when this happened and between me knowing she was okay and being right there incase things turned out badly I kept recording. -At no point did Malina go into distress or was in any danger – That being said, it is important to know the difference between chocking and gagging no matter how you feed baby. It is also important to know how to properly handle both. In this case I encouraged her (because getting involved can have mixed results) and she worked it out by herself without intervention.
Malina gagged a bit on the avocado egg.
The video cuts out like that because I saved the spoon. Malina quickly went back to eating and ended up wanting the spoon again too.
The last thing she tried was the baked breaded zucchini.
A note on breading: be sure to check that whatever you are using does not have honey in it for children under 1 year of age. Honey hides in all types of things and it’s better to be safe than sorry.
So I made the Baked breaded zucchini sticks from one of my BLW cookbooks. This specific recipe was from “Baby-Led Feeding” by Jenna Helwig. It turned out pretty good, the only thing I’d do to modify it, if I make it again, would be to try and squeeze out some of the moisture from the zucchini before breading to avoid soggy sticks. Malina was not a fan of the breading however so I might not get to try that modification any time soon.
“Maybe one bite.”“One bite might be too much.”
Or maybe she ate the breading off and didn’t like the zucchini. It’s hard to know for sure since Malina isn’t talking about it.
So I can add avocado to our list of successes and I know that Malina will eat hard boiled eggs when mixed with something. I’m going to add zucchini too since she did eat some of it, but I’m going to add a note to try it another way to see how she does.
Finally, I wanted to add that Malina is usually a very happy little girl and she only makes these upset sour faces when eating and only sometimes then as well. So here are a couple smiles from today’s mess.
“Oops, did I make a mess?”
“Come here, mama. I have avocado fingers for you!”
Oh and it was messy. There was avocado EVERYWHERE. Me and the dog got scheduled for baths after avocado-geddon. That spoon came at me and pegged me in the head. And the dog got avocado dropped on him soon after.
Also, remember what I said about her practicing with the spoon? Same is true for the sippy cup. She practiced for a month to get to where she is at and it was only with encouragement and an occasional helping hand that she is able to do as well as she does.
Using the sippy cup
At the end of the day, every baby is different and capable of different things. Malina can’t roll from stomach to back for example and crawls by pushing her head around on the floor. so don’t be hard on yourself or on baby. They will get there when they get there. So remember, that you are doing great and you’ve got this!
I woke up just shy of 7:30 am excited for Malina’s first meal. I was ready for this. I had Eric for backup if I needed any help or assistance with taking care of her or cooking and so I felt calm as I left the room, passing Malina as she slept in her crib, and went to the kitchen to preheat the oven.
Something I’d do different to save myself time in the future will probably be doing as much food prep as possible the night before. That and setting a delay start on the oven.
Malina was awake when I came back in the room and so we started our morning ritual. I said good morning, asked her how she slept, and then picked her up to give her a hug and kiss and told her we were going to go and change her before she could eat. I breast feed, so that can lead to longer or shorter feedings depending on baby. This morning it was a 10 minute feeding, so when she was done at 7:45 I knew I had until 8:30 to have her food ready and still be inside the feeding window.
Everything seems to say offer food after milk, within 30-60 minutes, so baby is not too hungry or tired. The other thing is you want it a decent bit away from the next feeding as well so it doesn’t interrupt it. Malina can usually go two hours first thing in the morning, so 8:30 was a perfect time to have her sit and eat her first breakfast.
The menu I planned and ended up giving her included egg omelet strips cooked in plain butter, baked carrots three ways (olive oil only, rosemary with oil, and pepper with oil), and mandarin orange slices.
I cut the carrots really quickly and tossed them in the oven first, then made the egg omelet. I ended up making one large egg omelet and dividing it between the three of us. Something I learned by the way is that butter is lactose free and thus not an allergy food. So I was happy to be able to add that flavor to our eggs still. Cooking was quick and while I dealt with the eggs, Malina danced and sang with her papa as he peeled the mandarins for us.
Food was ready just before 8:20 and we got ready to sit down together and eat. As per the BLW suggestion, we ate what she ate showing her how to pick up the foods and eat them. Though Malina only had eyes for her papa and how he ate the food, so that’s a thing now.
All of our plates ready to go for our first meal
With everything cooled for Malina we put on her food smock and loaded her into her high chair. She was really excited when she saw her own plate of food being put down.
It can be hard to tell, but this is her excited face. I mean she’s already grabbed a handful of egg too.
Of course she went for the eggs first. It was the closest thing and she picked it up right away and shoved it in her mouth. She went through all the stages of enjoyment, grief, and disgust before she shoveled more in her mouth and went through it all again. At one point she gagged and it freaked me out inside while on the outside I tried to act calm and talk her through spitting out or swallowing the food. She ended up swallowing it and then reading for her water. She pulverized the rest of the eggs, but probably only actually ate a few bites of it all together.
“Why do you people eat eggs? This is not pleasant.” Malina asked with just a look.
I had to move the carrots closer to get her to go for it next. She started with the plain one which she definitely hated more than the eggs and gagged for the second time. Once she got the offensive orange stick out of her mouth she tossed it to the dog and reached for her water again.
That look of disgust though really says it all. “Carrots are worse than egg!”
Malina is adventurous though and was quick to try another of the carrots. This time it was the rosemary one. The look of enjoyment she had as she sucked on this one was a complete 180 from the disgust of the plain olive oil carrot. I have to admit, the rosemary brings out the sweetness of the carrots and that probably helped the most, but when she was done eating all the rosemary off she had eaten most of the accompanying carrot as well.
“No orange yet, I’m still eating the carrot, mama. This carrot is definitely different from the first one. It’s way better.”
This is where Malina called it quits. She was a bit under twenty minutes into her meal and she just didn’t want anything else to do with the rest of it. When I started to take the plate, she half heartedly picked up a mandarin slice I had tried to offer her before and sucked on it a second before tossing it aside (our dog might need to go on a diet in the future). I asked her if she was done now and she reached for me to pick her up. So I took the food away as her papa kept an eye on her and then I came back to take off the smock and clean her up as Eric cleaned up the high chair.
All in all I consider this a great first day and first meal. Malina ate egg, carrots, and rosemary. Three new things and flavors. I will have to offer mandarins and pepper again, but I was so impressed with her and how she dealt with food for the first time.
As always, you are doing great and you’ve got this!
– Erica
Side note: Egg whites are an allergy food. There is no history of food allergies in either mine or my husbands family and Malina has had no eczema since she was born, both are possible precursors to possible food allergies. However, I am not a doctor and so I’d suggest getting your doctors opinion before introducing allergy foods. Our personal plan here is to do one allergy food a week for the next 8 weeks, working through the top 8 allergy foods, and document any signs of reaction. As of this evening posting Malina has had no reaction to the eggs.
So in my reading, research, and anecdotes from other Mamas/Papas/Caregivers I learned a lot about what BLW is.
Basically, baby eats what you eat.
More complex is, baby needs limited salt and it is suggested that you also limit sugar and spicy foods but neither is mandatory.
Aside from that you avoid honey (even if it’s been baked or cooked, because botulism poisoning is really bad and not worth the possible risk) for the first year and avoid whole nuts, popcorn, unpasteurized milk products, and raw/undercooked meats (including eggs unless in UK where they have Red Lion stamp) until age 5. Reasoning behind 5 years old seems to be related to further development of esophagus reflexes as well as immune system improvements. But I’m not a doctor and so if the general consensus is to not do a thing I’m going to try and follow it.
This is the info-graph I reference when in doubt or when I need a refresher:
From The Beginner’s Guide to Baby Led Weaning Facebook Group
The other important thing is how you cut and serve foods. You want pinky finger length and halved width size pieces in the beginning when baby does not have pincer grasp and then later you upgrade to small baby bite sized pieces (think small cubes) when baby can use pincer grasp, somewhere after 8 months old.
Again I have nice references I use for this from Jenna Helwig’s book “Baby-Led Feeding” –
After that things get more varied opinion wise. What I’ve taken away though is as follows: experiment with seasonings (minus salt, sugar, and spicy spices), experiment with textures (for example, baked is different from steamed) and that does also include smoother and chunkier purée type foods, and just let baby try things over and over again because sometimes they don’t want the carrot unless it’s smooshed, cold, and covered in rosemary.
Also, relax buddy. No one has the right to tell you how to do this or judge you for your choices, it’s hard enough doing that to ourselves as parents.
Malina’s BLW Food Adventures 