Herman's Hermits: Seers of the Future

Or any day, in our house.  Baby Cakes' body doesn't like dairy.

We have struggled for most of her life with diaper rash.  Really awful diaper rash.  The kind that would crack and ooze (no bleeding though, thank goodness).  I know a lot of people thought it was because we use cloth diapers instead of disposables, but that never made much of a difference.  It would get slightly better when we used disposables only because we were able to use zinc based diaper rash cream, which you can't use with cloth diapers.  Even so, her rashes would never completely go away.  And there were many times that she would load her diaper, and just start crying and screaming because she was so sore.  Times when she wouldn't sit down in her bath because the warm water stung.

My poor baby.

But, all is sunshine and roses in our home, because her rash has gone away.  We discovered dairy was the source of her rashes when we ran out of milk for a couple of days, and it almost immediately cleared up.  We had been giving her milk pretty much non stop because she doesn't register on the charts for her weight at all, and her pediatrician was concerned.  So, lots of cheese, whole milk, and butter on everything.  She loved the taste, but her body obviously didn't.  The thought never occurred to us that she had a problem with dairy, even though I had heard from multiple sources that constant diaper rash can be a sign of a food intolerance/allergy.  And now I've got Mom Guilt that I didn't figure it out sooner.

I'm not entirely sure what exactly she has, whether an allergy to dairy all together, or if she is just lactose intolerant.  Looking up the symptoms, an allergy would cause her immune system to go into over drive, and she would have some kind of a immune response, like massive mucus production, or hives, or swelling.  Intolerance usually shows as just a digestive problem, like nausea, constipation, or diarrhea (her particular symptom).  BUT, the intolerance symptoms can also be allergy symptoms.  *frustrated scream*

So she doesn't eat cheese, or anything with it, butter, or milk right now.  She can eat baked goods with dairy in it, so that makes it a little easier.  And I heard from a friend that yogurt can be eaten if you are lactose intolerant because it has the live and active cultures in it.  So we might try that, if I can find some other resources backing it up.

Personally, I'm leaning towards a lactose intolerance because she had one symptom: diarrhea (at least that we know of.  If her stomach ever hurt, we could never tell.  She's not a fussy baby.  And if she had gas from it, well, she's always been great at farting and burping, so that wouldn't have been any different).  No hives, no mucus, no swelling.  The only way to know for sure which she has is to get her tested, which we aren't going to do in the near future.  Removing dairy has worked for us, and for now, that's good enough.