5 Months

Yesterday, C turned 5 months old!  I really can't believe it, it seems like he just turned 4 months old last week.  He still has no hair, but is as cute as ever.  I get SO many comments on his big brown eyes, people call him owl baby.  I thought that was funny, so I had a friend of mine make him an owl hat:

She can make ANYTHING you can think of, and does custom orders!  Here's her shop, and her facebook album with some more pictures.  

C is doing really well, and growing like crazy (as you can see from the picture, he's a bit of a chunker)! He's laughing and cooing and babbling and blowing raspberries all the time.  He loves his daddy, and if my husband starts talking or moving around in the same room while C is eating, he'll pull off to stare at Daddy and see what he's doing.  

We have his allergies pretty well under control; I've eliminated the top 8 allergens from my diet (dairy, soy, wheat, egg, peanut, tree nut, fish, and shellfish), and thankfully it seems like that has done the trick.  I've tried challenging each of those foods (I didn't challenge peanuts because he'd had a reaction to everything up until then and I didn't want to put him through any more when I was pretty sure he'd react, and I don't eat seafood, so the fish/shellfish thing is easy for me), and he's reacted to everything I've challenged, so we're sticking with those eliminations and they're helping a lot.  I have a happy, healthy baby, and I'm below my pregnancy weight!

It's been rough getting used to this diet.  I have to cook pretty much everything from scratch to make sure that there aren't any allergens hidden in the ingredients, and I've had to find substitutions for foods.  Rice flour for flour, using 1/4 cup of applesauce in place on an egg in baking, spaghetti squash or rice pasta in place of wheat noodles, corn tortillas instead of flour, tahini paste instead of peanut butter (for the record, tahini paste does NOT taste good by itself, but I use it in Muddy Buddies and the chocolate and sugar cover it up well), and so on.  I miss my milk a LOT, and cheese on all my food, but I think I'm coping well.  

I'm nervous about the holidays.  We're going to be visiting family, so not only do I have to bring my cloth diapers to launder (C gets rashes from disposables), but I have to figure out how I'm going to feed myself.  I feel bad telling other people what they can and can't cook when I'm a guest (I prefer to eat at home before we go places), and I can't really trust food without cooking it myself or reading ALL  the ingredients used.  You wouldn't believe how many spices/sauces use soybean oil!  I just feel like I'm going to be a burden, so I'm going to have to find a Trader Joe's or a Whole Foods when we get there to get myself food.  

Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday EVER, and I'm not going to be able to eat anything!  I'm going to try and cook as much of the traditional holiday foods in an allergy-friendly way.  We'll see how everything goes.

I can't believe my little boy is growing so quickly.  Here's a picture, but I couldn't get him to sit still for a second, so he has a blurry arm that he was waving around and kicking, lol: