I’ve always been a tea lover. I loved tea long before I even knew about coffee (I’ve been meaning to ask my mom when she started letting me drink tea…seems like I was very small when I was drinking iced tea). My favorite is chai lattes and herbals (Orange spice or a nice apple cinnamon in the winter time…mmmm) though I’ll gladly take a good black or iced tea too. After a year of being off tea (and now trying to avoid caffeine), it’s taken me time to get back to my prior tea preferences but I’m getting there slowly. Most of the time I don’t even think of tea as an option when I’m thirsty (despite having an entire cabinet in my kitchen dedicated to all things tea!).
I had to cut out tea completely from diet when Sugarplum was a baby. At just a few days old, poor Sugarplum scared me to death. While shopping for stickers one day at a craft store, I looked down into sweet baby girl’s face (who was comfy cozy in her car seat) just in time to see her projectile vomit EVERYWHERE! After the initial shock, horror and a lengthy clean up back at the car we settled back into our day’s plan and I ignored it. Until it happened again a few days later and again after that. At her one month checkup I asked her doctor if he thought it was something I was eating or anything else to worry about and he said probably not and to just wait it out. Well, after a few more projectile vomiting messes I decided I had to do something so began keeping a food diary where I wrote down what I ate when and marked when she threw up.
The culprit? Tea. Totally weird. Only tea. Herbal teas were fine (since they don’t have any actual tea) but black, green, white, ACTUAL tea got her. Everyone I mentioned it to had some explanation: “It’s probably the caffeine” but I could have unlimited coffee and cola. “It must be the tannins” but wine did not bother her. To this day I do not know what it was about tea that made her so volatile but every time I had it until she was about a year old she would vomit. I started slowly reintroducing tea to my own diet at around a year old and she was able to tolerate it. Now I’m curious to see when she’s older if she will be able to tolerate her own tea drinking or not.
