Update on his poor "po"

So...we've been diaper rash free for 4 days now (a record!!) Looks like he has an allergy to milk proteins.

As the last milk product standing, we cut yogurt out of his diet late last week. Since then we've been sitting pretty on the diaper rash front. (We did have a little bout of diarrhea from the broccoli-rice casserole on Thanksgiving, but thankfully managed to evade the rash...perhaps because I used lactose-free milk??)

Visited his pedi yesterday to discuss our hypotheses and findings and he says it sounds like a milk-protein allergy (amazingly entertaining to me that he can diagnose it based on the color and smell of the poop as we described it.) The milk-protein allergy is apparently different from lactose-intolerance and thankfully something that he should grow out of as he gets older. On the other hand, it doesn't mean that he won't also be lactose-intolerant. Apparently kids don't display signs of lactose-intolerance until they get a little older. And it's genetic so he's got one strike against him already.

In any case, we'll be keeping all cow-milk products out of his diet for a couple months before we start challenging. Then we just keep challenging with the milk products every 2-3 months until we see that he's over it.

In the meantime, he can have soy milk or goat's milk or almond milk or horse milk. (Did you even know that there was such a thing as horse milk??? Apparently it tastes pretty similar to cow's milk...in contrast to goat's milk, which he may hate the taste of).

We're sticking with the soy formula for the time being. In extreme cases of milk-protein allergies there can be a cross-reaction to soy products, but then he shouldn't be gaining weight and otherwise prospering. So we're proceeding like soy's okay at the moment. (It may well be since we were still giving him yogurt and cheeses in addition to the soy). Now we just have to adapt our cooking to this new information. Makes things a little more difficult (there was nothing quite so easy as pureeing the fruit of the day and adding it to yogurt for breakfast) but as soon as we find some horse or soy milk we should be able to directly substitute them in all the recipes which currently call for milk. I think we've already found a cream-substitute (it's a veggie-base).

When you really start to think about it...milk-products are EVERYWHERE. Oh well...here's hoping we've seen the last of the diaper rashes!