I’ve shared a lot about Jonathan’s journey over the past couple of months with plagiocephaly and torticollis. I haven’t mentioned much about Harrison’s food allergies lately, and I’ve never really shared how we identified his food allergies.

Harrison has several different food allergies. We’ve identified that he is allergic to eggs and sesame. Nathan has very mild food allergies, but it wasn’t until our niece was diagnosed with a severe gluten allergy a year before Harrison was born that we had food allergies first come to roost for our family. Because of what we saw first hand with Evie, we were on the look out for food allergies with Harrison when we started to introduce solid foods to him. I nervously gave him gluten for the first time, and waited nervously to see if he would react. I was on high alert, too, as he first tried peanuts. I wasn’t really well versed on the common allergens, though, aside from gluten, peanuts, tree nuts, fish, and dairy.

I’ve learned now that there are something called the top 8 most common food allergens.

• Tree nuts
• Peanuts
• Eggs
• Milk
• Crustaceans
• Fish
• Wheat
• Soy

We went through all of these allergens and seemed to have no side effects. Seriously. Even though I now know that Harrison is allergic to eggs.

The first time I noticed a reaction to food, Harrison was eating hummus. He had slathered himself in hummus, covering his mouth and most of his face, and I noticed immediately that his face had gotten puffy, and hives were showing up all over his face. I gave him a little bit of children’s Benadryl to get the hives to go down, and took pictures of his face and the food label to report to his pediatrician when we saw her next.

We were referred to an allergist to test and confirm Harrison’s allergy to hummus, and here’s what we learned:

Allergies are weird. There is no black or white answer to determine whether you are allergic to something. Allergists utilize three data points to attempt to pin-point your food allergens. Blood test, scratch test (where they stretch the dermis of your skin with the allergen and see if it shows a reaction), and evidence of actually eating the potentially allergenic food.

You can have a positive blood test, meaning your bloodwork shows an allergic reaction to an allergen, but have experienced a physical reaction to the allergen, and a positive skin test. They would conclude that the physical reaction and positive skin test are stronger evidence of an allergic reaction. However, you can show no physical reaction when exposed to an allergen, no positive skin test, and a positive blood test. They could conclude that you likely don’t have an allergy to that allergen. Confused yet? Yeah, we were too. I think this was explained to us at least twice before it started to sink in.

While we were waiting for our appointment with the allergist, Harrison went to his Gigi’s house, and was helping her bake, and stuck his hands in raw eggs. Immediately, his arms covered in hives and swelled. We were shocked – we had been feeding Harrison eggs for six months and had never seen a reaction. This was the most clear allergic reaction he had to date, though. We began avoiding eggs in everything – baked, scrambled, or otherwise – until we saw our allergist.

After seeing our allergist for several years now, here’s what we’ve learned about Harrison. They gather 2 of the 3 data points for Harrison every year. So, every year when we go in, we have bloodwork done and they do the scratch test on his back with the allergens we have identified as problematic. Based on that, our allergist recommends whether we should move on to a food challenge, where Harrison eats the food in the office over a period of four hours, and they monitor him for results. We have yet to get to a food challenge, and here’s why: Harrison’s blood test comes back positive for both sesame and eggs. Harrison’s scratch test comes back positive for just sesame. Given two positive results for sesame, they conclude that he is likely still allergic, and it doesn’t make sense to move to a food challenge. Eggs, however, this year came back negative on his scratch test. We have, though, accidentally served him eggs recently, and noticed a physical reaction in him. That’s enough to make the allergist conclude that it doesn’t make sense to move to a food challenge given the two other positive pieces of evidence.

The other thing that had has really confused for a long time was trying to match certain foods that Harrison was eating with his eczema flairs. Harrison’s skin has been super sensitive since the day he was born, and for a long time, we were trying to figure out whether we were introducing things to him that caused his eczema to flair up. To make a very long story short, doctors do not understand what causes eczema, and it’s nearly impossible to link an allergen to an eczema flair. Sometimes eczema can flair immediately and other times it can flair days later. The only thing that can really be done with eczema is to treat it when it occurs.

Like most anomalies in life, we’ve learned to live with avoiding Harrison’s allergens. I’ve learned a substitute that works decently well for eggs, and he is still able to have baked goods having never shown an allergic reaction to an egg that has been baked in say…a cookie. 😊 We are hopeful that he grows out of his food allergies, and there’s a good chance that he will. But as for now, we are just monitoring and avoiding his food allergens.