Soy Vay...

We took Charlotte to her first food challenge today.  A food challenge is when you give a suspected amount of allergy-causing food in the safety of the doctor's office and see what happens.  It was quite the ordeal.  We were at the allergy department for four hours, right in the middle of naptime/  Today's challenge was soy, so we were asked to bring soy milk for Charlotte to drink.  The nurse first put a very small amount on her lips to see if that would react.  We waited thirty minutes, and then the nurse gave her 20 mL in Charlotte's sippy cup.  And then we waited thirty more minutes.  This continued every thirty minutes, with the amount doubling each time and maxing out at 160 mL (about 4 oz).  It was exhausting. Can you imagine how hard it is to force a 14 month old to keep drinking liquids when she doens't want to? And poor Charlotte couldn't eat anything during that time for fear of cross contamination, so it was horrible when she saw crackers in the diaper bag.

(By the way, Charlotte learned how to sign cracker last week, and now it's all she does. She asks for crackers for breakfast, lunch and dinner.  And if she even hears the word she starts signing it.  So you can imagine how mad she was when she couldn't have any.)

During the three hours of the test, we couldn't leave the waiting room.  Luckily, we were prepared and brought a lot of toys and Finding Nemo.  Charlotte has the attention span of, well a one year old, so television thankfully doesn't hold a lot of interest.  Chris and I, on the other hand, enjoyed watching the movie.

Anyway, as you may have guessed by the tone of this post, nothing happened, thankfully.  No rash, no hives, nothing.  Obviously soy was a false positive, so we can now scratch that one off the list.  (We'd already suspected this based on the fact that everything, including all of Charlotte's precious crackers, contain soybean oil, and we've had no reactions.) 

Next up is lentil.  Lentils were one of Charlotte's favorite foods a few months ago, but we stopped giving it to her around the time we found out about the peas.  We really want to do the challenge with cashew, but it's going to be hard.  For one, she's never had any kind of peant-type butter, so she may not tolerate the texture. For another, she's still a little young to eat hard nuts for fear of choking.  So that's going to wait.

We're slow rolling the next challenge because it requires both of us to take at least half a day off from work, so the next one won't be for another six weeks.  In the meantime, it's good to have one fewer food to worry about! (Make that two; Charlotte ate a couple cherry tomatoes the other day with no reaction). Bring on the tofu and edamame. :)

(Tomorrow I leave for Dallas.  Upper 90s and incredibly humid.  I don't get back until about 10 on Saturday night, so Chris has a long day entertaining Miss Charlotte.)