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Before this year, our fam­ily was pretty — what I would call — aver­age. Hus­band, wife, 2 kids, 2 dogs, in a 3 bed­room 2 bath house, liv­ing in the south­ern most part of the mid-west, with all four sea­sons. Then things got crazy…I was freak­ing out for a bit only to find out…THIS IS NORMAL! HA!

One of these chal­lenges have been food aller­gies in Grem­lin. Almost to the day he turned 7, he started hav­ing odd symp­toms. We had also signed him up for soc­cer and I think that really brought things to the fore­front. His main symp­toms was when he would sit down for din­ner, he would imme­di­ately get cold, lips and fin­ger­tips turn blue, and he would get “buzzy” — lethar­gic; fad­ing out on us. The doc­tors ran test after test and because he would have breath­ing prob­lems with soc­cer they marked him down as hav­ing asthma.

Prob­lem with this is:

• He passed the asthma test fine (PFT).
• His heart was fine.
• The doc­tors never could fig­ure out why his lips and fin­ger­tips turned blue.
• It all cen­tered around food.

Thank­fully Gremlin’s doc­tor is a common-sense gal (LOVE HER!) and finally just said, “he could be hav­ing com­pli­ca­tions with food aller­gies. Instead of hav­ing him poked and prod­ded fur­ther, why don’t you keep a jour­nal and see what might be caus­ing this. Start with gluten.”

BINGO!

Six months later, we now know that for sure he’s aller­gic to any­thing with wheat, MSG, and red dye in it. He seems to have an issue with some sug­ars but we can’t seem to pin­point what exactly is caus­ing it. He can’t have plain sugar, but brown sugar is fine (which is only sugar with molasses added to it). Makes no sense…still research­ing that one.

The biggest chal­lenge is find­ing cre­ative meals and snacks. Pretty much any­thing easy and pre-made straight out of the gro­cery store is out. Thank­fully Grem­lin is very adven­tur­ous when it comes to try­ing new things. He’s a good sport.

From time to time I’ll add some gluten-free, MSG-free food that just really tick­les my fancy. One site that has some great ideas for kid­dos in this sit­u­a­tion is Only Some­times Clever — which, hello!, is so not true.

So am I in the dark or have you guys ever had to deal with this on some level or another?