I haven't written much about Finn's diet - I am so useless in the kitchen that sharing recipes isn't going to be popular (I can make a great piece of toast though), but Finn has been weaned on a dairy and egg free diet. His intolerance to dairy was diagnosed at around 10 weeks old (I wrote about his CMPI diagnosis here) and his intolerance to egg was evident when we started weaning. It took us a long time to adjust to the changes and once I finally felt that we were sorted with the dairy free cooking, it seemed to be time to start the milk ladder!
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If you didn't already know, the milk ladder is a step by step way to introduce dairy to a child or adult that is intolerant to cows milk protein. We were advised that we could start at any point from 12 months but due to being heavily pregnant and having a newborn, we decided to wait a little longer until we were all a bit more settled before we began. Finn is now 19 months and whilst his verbal communication is still very limited, we understand what we are looking for and recognise the signs of his intolerance - generally that he is very upset and clearly in pain all night after eating something he shouldn't.
We have made many changes as a family to accomodate his intolerances and we now only have dairy free spread in the house (Pure soya spread and Violife creamy original cheese spread) and all three boys love the Violife dairy free cheese. We eat certain meals like lasagne less often as making them dairy free was a bit more akward (completely possible but we are lazy packet sauce type people). We eat fajitas and casseroles more as they are naturally dairy free and we found the places that sell dairy free garlic bread (Asda value frozen is great and surprisingly Pizza Hut!). Picnics contain pom bears and party rings and Finn's formula milk is available for him on prescription until he is two years old.
This week we took the first step on the ladder though. Malted milk biscuits are the first stage as they contain milk powder and we gave Finn half a biscuit on the first day, one biscuit on the second day and two on the third day. It has been roughly a week now and we are still giving the biscuits every day. We haven't noticed any issues which means stage one is a success! The next step is digestive biscuits and they are on my shopping list for tomorrow. Hopefully we will start being able to introduce more dairy into our family meals soon, but we are going to take it slowly making sure there are no issues before we move on to the next stage. The recommendations as to the amount you can start with vary but as Finn's is an intolerance rather than allergy we decided to go straight for the half biscuit.
Having two big brothers who are still little enough to leave crumbs everywhere, I am hoping that this means I can stop obsessively hoovering the living room floor when they have cheese with their dinners and watching Finn like a hawk at playgroups when they bring out snack time. I don't think we are going to attempt egg again until he turns two as he definitely still reacted to it at 18 months when he accidentally ate a couple of pieces of egg fried rice.
I will update more on our Milk Ladder journey as we progress.
