Shopping for a Special Diet

Doodle is 14 months old today and by this point, both girls were eating anything and everything (the only exceptions were nuts and shellfish).  They were regularly having cow’s milk in a cup (though both were still nursing) and eating whatever the family had for dinner.

Doodle, though is still on a pretty restricted diet.  My initial hesitation to move him on to new foods as quickly as I did the girls, I now realize must have been a gut instinct that he shouldn’t have it.  I still have not started any wheat (it will be the last thing we add once everything else gets sorted out).  He has been on and off dairy a total of 4 times now (cheese, yogurt, butter and things cooked with milk, no drinking milk yet) and has gotten terrible diarrhea each time.  I’ve also removed corn from his diet at he suggestion of a friend (who has a lot of family food allergies) after he developed a bad case of eczema on his neck that we couldn’t get cleared up (and wouldn’t you know, a few day off the corn and it’s nearly gone).

So this leaves me in a shopping dilema: no wheat, no dairy, no corn, no nuts (and no shellfish but that’s the easy one!).  I ran into my local Neighborhood Market (Walmarts’s grocery store chain) to pick up milk for the girls a few days ago and stopped by that baby food aisle to see what they had for Doodle.  NOTHING.  I’m not even exaggerating: they had nothing for babies that did not contain wheat, corn or milk.  Sure they had jars of baby food but I committed to finger foods only 8 months ago and I’m not a big pouch fan (even when I gave them to Sugarplum as a baby when we traveled I had the screw on spoons, something about babies sucking their milk from a bottle and then sucking their food from a pouch…I could write a whole post about it…maybe someday!)

It’s not a problem when we’re home.  I usually give him fresh fruit for breakfast and then some gluten (and now corn) free cereal to top him off.  Lunch he’ll get a veggie (either fresh or frozen) and whatever protein I have leftover for him in the fridge and maybe a few snap pea crisps or sweet potato chips after.  Dinner is much like lunch, veggie, meat (chicken, turkey, beef, whatever the family is having sauteed in a little EVOO).

The problem is when we go out.  I can’t trust stuff to not be cooked in butter and I won’t give him fried stuff at restaurants that serve fried shrimp (just in case since hubby’s daddy is allergic).  So usually he ends up having baby puffs or dried fruit.  His favorite is freeze dried peas I buy at Target, but a boy only needs so many peas!  And the big problem right now is we are heading off on a 10 day visit to hubby’s family and there isn’t a lot of store variety right near by so I need to take some stuff with me.

So after meeting a friend at a far away park yesterday morning, I decided to stop into faraway Whole Foods and stock up.  I can get quite a lot of stuff at my local Target or grocery store but I wanted more variety for him.  I don’t want him living on a diet of rice and oats and know that he needs more variety in his grains.  This is what I came home with ($33 later!):

The hardest part, though, was the veggies!  I could get him dried veggies like green beans (which the girls adore) or the veggie crisp varieties but he doesn’t have enough teeth to successfully chew them (he’s barely a 5 toother–two center bottom, three center top and those aren’t all the way in yet).

I just feel so overwhelmed in this endeavor.  I’m sure it’s easier than I’m making it, I mean there are millions of people with allergies that navigate this problem every day!  But he’s still very much a baby and that leaves my options much more limited.  Plus we aren’t millionaires and while I will spend what I need to in order to keep him strong and healthy, I will continue to try and save wherever I can and try the cheaper things first.

Luckily he’s not too picky.  He happily ate his buckwheat and hemp flakes after devouring his clementine this morning (though to me it looked and tasted like I just shredded the cardboard box up for him!)  Lunch will be the rest of the frozen green beans he’s been working on all week and maybe a scrambled egg.  Dinner, who knows…I’ll figure that out for everyone later!