Alexander, my beautiful 22month old boy child has eczema. It is not the worst thing in the world but for my husband and I it was one thing too many. My darling boy was born after 12 hours of labour in a homebirth situation. It was a miraculous experience which I will probably write about at a later time. By day 3 or so he was mustard yellow, a couple of days later he was in hospital with such high billary(not sure of the spelling) count that I was being told if I didn’t do xyz then his brain might fry. Not to mention he was put into the pediatric ward of a government hospital beside a little boy with meningitis. The nurses were lovely but not too sure on how to use the ultra-violet light bed-thing, so darling boy cooked for the first day. He screamed incessantly. I should have realized that by that stage I did not have enough milk and my child was starting to starve. I did everything under the sun thinking it was working, but by his 6week check-up he was classified as failing to thrive. Wow! I went into hysterics! I eventually went onto an anxiety pill with the by-product of milk production and started adding some formula after every feed. We seemed to be doing well with that system (dropped the pills after a week or so) and started him on solids at about 5 months. He was happy eating all the mush I was making for him until he started teething. Teething is horrible, horrible, yuck, unpleasant! When we could get him eating yoghurt we did. He lived on yoghurt and cow’s milk from about a year (we had taken him off formula and I’d stopped breast-feeding). Again loads of teething drama. All the while this was happening my family (parents) was going through one of the worst experiences of their lives. And as in all families we were all in pain. And then around October of last year Alexander started coming out in eczema rashes. Aagh!!!! We used all the horrible creams, bathed him in grease nothing worked until the day someone mentioned dairy. Dairy was causing my child so much discomfort. Damn cows and the way we live that has cow’s milk in practically everything!!!! So now we like goats, coconuts and rice and all the milk they produce. Anyway back to carrot cake for brekkie. Alexander doesn’t like eating, he is tall and strong and often skeletal, so every now and again I will offer him cake or biscuits just so he’ll have something in his tummy. This morning it was carrot cake courtesy of Woolworths (not my favourite place). Yeah for carrot cake made without any dairy! I should have just given my child formula from the beginning, it probably wouldn’t have prevented the eczema, but my child might have a different approach to food. Breast-feeding is definitely best but it is not the answer if there are genuine problems. Ciao for now.
"It takes courage to grow up and become who you really are." — E.E. Cummings "Unbeing dead isn't being alive." — E.E. Cummings "We do not believe in ourselves until someone reveals that deep inside us something is valuable, worth listening to, worthy of our trust, sacred to our touch. Once we believe in ourselves we can risk curiosity, wonder, spontaneous delight or any experience that reveals the human spirit." — E.E. Cummings I had not intended to start with anything like the above quotes, but aren't they amazing? What I had wanted was to find a poem about winter. In the spider-webbed, cardboard-boxed-up mind of mine I remember something and I decided it was e.e.cummings but even though the internet is oh wow! I can't find it. Or maybe it's the dust. My husband needs all of the credit for this post. We discuss our life continuously. We look at the good and the bad, what we are doing right and what is going horribly wrong. A
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