Can you go to the allergist and get a scratch test done? If it were positive, then you'd need to avoid lentil or have a supervised food challenge, but if it were negative, you'd have 95% certainty that you can tolerate lentils.

This would mean a complete revocation of Internet privileges in my house. I would (and have) password-protected every Internet-capable device in the house. If she needs the Internet for school, a parent will enter the password and then closely supervise until the device is turned off. If she wants to strengthen her creative writing, give her a pencil and a stack of paper. In my house, this would continue until said child demonstrated trustworthiness.

I use a little on my milk - allergic son's pizza. That's pretty much the only thing I use it for. Personally I think it tastes gross and nothing like real cheese, but since he's never had real cheese, he's happy with it. To make the (very expensive!) bag last longer, I weigh out small portions of it into plastic baggies and freeze them until needed.

I order stuff that I can't get locally (mostly allergy-friendly breakfast cereal, snacks, soy milk, etc. for my allergic son) or that's cheaper than I can get it locally (my daughter's favorite Annie's snack crackers, k cups, etc.).

Celiac and wheat allergy are completely different. Celiac would not show up on a skin prick test for wheat allergy. If your market doesn't have egg replacer, try Amazon. (When your kid eats the weird foods that mine does to avoid 8 different allergens, subscribe & save is your friend!) You can also google how to make egg replacer--it's mostly baking powder.

In that case, I think you're right to be strict, at least for a while. Like I said, highly recommend the So Delicious products: they make "milk", coffee creamer, yogurt, and frozen goodies. To sub for egg in baking use Ener-G egg replacer or you can make a "flax egg" by soaking flax in water (we use King Arthur brand). I like Earth Balance vegan mayo and their shortening sticks in baking because they're non-hydrogenated. Many Applegate products (hot dogs, bacon, lunch meat, pepperoni) are dairy free. (You do have to be careful with deli meats because cheese is frequently cut on the same slicers. Buy the prepackaged kind.) As for chocolate, Hershey's has very good labeling and that includes their Scharffen Berger brand. Enjoy Life is also good. Life is stressful enough with a food-allergic child, a girl needs her chocolate! Highly recommend cookbooks by Cybele Pascal and books about food allergy by Dr. Scott Sicherer (on the board of directors of FARE, formerly FAAN, and we're very fortunate in that our son is his patient). I think the previous poster meant to say that Fleischman's unsalted *margarine* is dairy free. Butter is definitely not dairy free! And be careful with goat's milk--many, if not most individuals allergic to cow's milk will be cross-reactive to goat's milk. Maybe have a skin test done before trying it.

Are the egg & milk in your diet causing problems for your baby? The reason I ask is that my son stopped nursing at age 3.5 and during that time I kept eating almost everything he's allergic to (very severe allergies and history of anaphylaxis to egg & milk, plus wheat, barley, rye, peanut, tree nut, and sunflower seed). I kept peanut / tree nut out of my diet because it was giving him eczema. But if I just stayed away from the nuts, he was perfectly healthy with porcelain skin. My allergist said that so little of the allergenic protein makes its way into breastmilk to worry about unless it was causing a problem. (It's way too small of an amount to cause a significant reaction.) I think I probably wouldn't have nursed him as long as I did if I had had to live on such a restricted diet. And I think that for a child with a severely restricted diet, the breastmilk was so beneficial to him! And now that he's nearing his 4th birthday and starting to outgrow some of his allergens (even ones his drs. said he probably wouldn't outgrow) and his IgE numbers are falling, I wonder if the tiny amounts of allergenic protein he received through my breastmilk actually "taught" his immune system to recognize them. Experiment and see what you can get away with, foodwise. If regular milk and egg in your diet bother him, try baked egg and milk. I think there is also a rotation diet out there that allows you to eat the allergenic foods on occasion, making sure that the proteins can't build up too much in your milk. Eat all the dark chocolate you want--there's no milk in that! Also try the So Delicious coconut ice cream--the chocolate flavor is so rich and creamy! Good luck!

We school for a portion of the summer so that we can take all of December off.

They start after Labor Day here, too--I'm in upstate NY.

Can you look for a wedding band with some small diamonds set into it so that you can still get a little sparkle?

Salzburg

:iagree:

Here it is Dec. 1st and my daughter (Aug. 10 b'day) was still the youngest in her Catholic school K class. Everyone redshirts here.

If you're in the wrong generation, then so am I, because neither can I stand this. And I see it mostly in teens, but also surprisingly often in adults! It's kind of ironic that homeschoolers are so frequently asked how they will "socialize" their children, because I notice that the homeschooled teens I know have far better manners/social skills than the ones who attend school!