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<\/a>Who takes a kid who can\u2019t have cheese to an Italian restaurant?\u00a0 Like a flood overcoming me, I welled up with frustration and anger and sorrow for my poor little guy as he screamed with hunger.<\/p>\nI finally calmed him down by nursing him (even though he had just fed at the last store we went to) while I tried to make sense of the menu and pick something for him without a list of ingredients.<\/p>\n
I\u2019ve become a champion ingredient reader when giving Doodle food.\u00a0 He is sensitive to both dairy and corn (and possibly wheat, though the jury is still out on that one).\u00a0 Dairy is fairly easy to spot: milk, cheese, butter, yogurt.\u00a0 But corn hides, it\u2019s in everything.\u00a0 Corn meal, corn starch, corn syrup.\u00a0 It\u2019s everywhere.<\/p>\n
I have two beautiful, healthy girls.\u00a0 Girls who can (and pretty much do) eat anything.\u00a0 And I never realized until earlier this year how lucky I am.<\/p>\n
I never expected to be \u201cthat\u201d mommy.\u00a0 The one who has to watch everything my kid eats.\u00a0 Who has to be careful of who I let watch my kid and give a stern disclaimer \u201che can\u2019t have ANY dairy or anything with corn.\u00a0 THIS is what he can have.\u00a0 PLEASE don\u2019t give him anything else!\u201d<\/p>\n
I\u2019m lucky because his reactions are limited to diarrhea and severe eczema and (as far as we know) are not life threatening.\u00a0 He\u2019s not allergic (that we know of) and has never gotten hives or had an anaphylactic reaction.\u00a0 But he COULD.\u00a0 I don\u2019t know if someday he WILL and that scares the crap out of me.<\/p>\n
So I\u2019m careful.\u00a0 I read every label.\u00a0 If it has corn or dairy, I don\u2019t give it to him and I watch that he doesn\u2019t get too much wheat since he\u2019s reacted after having it a few times.<\/p>\n
But those three things are in pretty much every food that is sold with a label.\u00a0 So my kid lives on plain \u00a0fruit and veggies (except when he demands cinnamon) and meat and eggs.\u00a0 And it\u2019s fine, except when we go out.<\/p>\n
I don\u2019t always have stuff \u201cready to serve\u201d for him and I\u2019ve learned (the hard way) that I can\u2019t rely on restaurants having food for him.<\/p>\n
He\u2019s big enough to have pretty much anything and by this age both my girls were eating pretty much anything and everything (with the exception of nuts and shellfish).<\/p>\n
But my little guy can not have macaroni and cheese or grilled cheese or pizza or tomato soup or chicken nuggets or a cheeseburger or a ham and cheese sandwich or a taco. My kid may never get to eat a real taco!<\/p>\n