Egg Protein

My son has had bad skin, eczema, since he was five months old.  Recently, on two occasions, he had a terrible reaction to food.  His face gets red when he eats, his hands look terrible because he eats with his hands a lot, but he's not had an immediate, aggressive histamine reaction that resulted in hives before.

The telling time was when we fed him some meringue.  My husband had whipped up the egg whites and added sugar.  Two ingredients, delicious, immediate ferocious reaction when we gave my son a little bit on his fingers to taste.

We had no idea.  It wasn't until I mentioned it to a friend who's a nurse that we got some insight.  Children have undeveloped immune systems.  There are four proteins in egg whites that can commonly be interpreted by babies systems as foreign invaders.  In general, the reactions aren't life-threatening.  But they can play havoc on their skin, and guess what, cause eczema.

Had we just identified one single item that would not only help with the redness he experienced on his hands and face when he ate, but also help these waves of eczema we've been battling?  It appears so.

The good news is babies outgrow the reaction when they have a more developed immune system.  The other good news is egg is a required flag for food product labels.  There are over twenty ingredients that contain egg whites, but the bottom of the list will say in bold "Contains egg, wheat, whey, etc." so it's an easy item to avoid.

Egg is in a lot of things, but not nearly as many as I was worried about.  Also, he doesn't have a bad reaction to cooked eggs and small portions in food, so we're avoiding where we can and not worrying too much if he ingests a little.  He's fairly good at pushing away a food he doesn't feel comfortable eating, like pudding.  What child doesn't like chocolate pudding?  My child, because it has egg in it. 

The Big Boy Update:  Mop.  New word of the week.  He loves his toy mop.  He picks it up, tries to mop his sister's head and says, "mop mop mop" the whole time.  Today he has his eighteen-month checkup, with shots, at the doctor.  We get to show off his new, less-eczema-encrusted skin and see our favorite doctor after lunch.

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  So close to crawling.  She has got strength my son didn't have.  He didn't get his belly off the ground to crawl at first and just drug himself along.  She not only gets up on her hands and knees, but because she can't figure out how to move forward, she gets all the way up on her hands and feet.  And she balances pretty well like that.  It will be interesting to see what the next few weeks bring with crawling.  At this rate, when she figures out what to do to move, she's going to take off.