So this evening, Hallie had another one of her famous cough-cough-bottle-vomit episodes. We were a bit out of practice so Sharon didn't have the famous bucket nearby (it's been a long time since one of these events) and consequently the mess (which included dinner) was fairly spectacular. I was also unprepared so I needed to call in the paper towel reinforcements from the basement (haven't been using many of these lately, so I didn't have my typical stash of two extra rolls upstairs). Hallie, of course, was asleep when all of this happened, but woke up from the coughing and vomiting and then had to be put back to bed.
This comes on the heels of her swallowing some water from the wading pool this afternoon and vomiting as a result of that. She still cannot handle thin liquids (we still thicken pretty much everything to a consistency that's between nectar and honey; she does take little sips of unthickened juice, but not much and not often). Clearly she isn't ready for thins, yet, but my sense (and my sense about things tends to be pretty good) is that this episode tonight was not about the pool water but something else.
Possible culprits?
1. Beef, after all (especially since I jinxed us with the last post).
2. Hot dogs, but not beef in particular. The ones we use are gluten and casein free, and the only ingredients listed are celery juice, paprika, onion and garlic powder, lactic acid from beets, and salt and pepper. Still, that does leave an awful lot beside beef.
3. The Gerber plums and apples she ate at dinner. A long shot, but Gerber is known for more cross-contamination problems than is Beech Nut (which she's been eating quite happily without incident and whose food contains some iron, as opposed to Earth's Best)
Of course I responded by googling and searching the POFAK site frantically and don't have any conclusive answers. I think we just have to wait and see. If the vomiting keeps up, we will know she is responding to something in the hot dogs (beef or something else). That's the typical pattern with Hallie. If it is a food allergy or intolerance, she's taken longer than average to respond (she responds very quickly to rice and other grains and milk but took a few days to respond to soy, for example). But a delay of four days is not unheard of, especially given the very small quantities of hot dogs she's eating (never more than a third to half a hot dog at any sitting, and more typically that's been over the course of a day). Today she only had a few bites of hot dog and mostly safe pureed foods so that makes the hot dogs a less likely culprit, but these food allergy things are so capricious and weird that it can make your head spin.
Anyway, that all means that we're still at 85 vomit free days and that we had 6 vomit free days this week. I was so hoping for seven, but that was not to be.
It's way late right now and I've just finished cleaning up for the cleaning folks coming tomorrow (let's hope that they do a better job than the ones we used to have come in twice a month) and making the kiddo's bottles. I am hoping that Hallie sleeps through the night---between the no naps (and no bottle) in the car home and the major vomit after eating a decent dinner and drinking over 6 ounces of her bottle, she's down in terms of quantity consumed today. When Sharon was finally able to settle Hallie down around 11:30, the girl only drank about 4.5 ounces of her milk, so she's had maybe a total of 10 ounces of milk today and perhaps as much as 600 calories, but certainly no more than that. I deeply hope that she sleeps through the night and that tomorrow ends up being a better day.
To end on a more upbeat note: it turns out that Hallie can not only identify most (over 20 for sure) letters of the alphabet (only upper case) when they are written/printed, but that she can identify all letters of the alphabet until "P" when they are signed to her. She was refusing to nap on the way home from our meetup with Eliza Grace and her mom in Princeton, so I was amusing her in the back seat of the car. I started to sign to see whether she could get my alphabet signs, and amazingly enough she did. She got bored at "P" so she may know Q through Z as well, but just suffers from a raging case of a toddler's limited attention span.
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