Matthew Update

So it's been a bit since I talked about Matthew. For the past couple weeks I wasn't really sure what to make of him, so I've just been watching, evaluating and waiting to see if he stablizes well enough to be confident we're on the right track.

So we've now gone over two weeks without any vomits, this is definitely a plus. On March 25th we stopped feeding him any types of cereals (rice, wheat, barley, etc) and put him on just veggies and fruits. It's interesting that shortly after this his rash completely cleared up and has not flared up since. His face also looks much smoother and nicer and you can tell that it has recuperated from it's irritation and isn't just waiting beneath the surface to burst out again. We have no idea if this is from taking the cereals away or just recuperation from being off milk, it is interesting that only days before taking him off the cereals we were still getting bad flareups and at that point he had already been off milk for six weeks. But at the same time we were having these rash flare-ups during the time period where we had him completely off of all solids ... so I don't think we've really discovered anything We'll wait a few more weeks before we reintroduce any type of cereals, that way if his face stays clear and then suddenly re-flares we have a pretty good indication.

Overall he seems to be doing better. There are still some issues, but they are not as loud and clear as before. He continues to have days where he drinks well and days where he's not all that interested in his bottle. Before the latter days would result in a vomit, but he's no longer vomitting. Our original reason for taking him off of cereals was because he showed no interested in them and was always very stuffed up to the point he couldn't drink his bottles during the nights, but yet would appear fine and without any cold symptoms during the day. But of course he has now developed cold symptoms, only a few days after we took him off cereals, so we have no idea where we stand on that now as this cold seems neverending. My excitement over his desire to eat has diminished somewhat. We definitely are not getting half to whole jars of baby food in him anymore. He's very up and down, mostly only eating 1tbsp to about 1/4 of a jar and sometimes even that's a bit of work to get in him, with the occasional time where he surprises us and eats 1/2 a jar. For now we're just happy he's attempting to eat, although it would be so nice to have a kid who just gets that eating is a good thing!! And when it comes to happiness ... well he's not all that great in that area ... good days and bad here also.

So overall he's more stable then he was, but hasn't shown us a complete and good turnaround. As it stands right now there's nothing clear enough to indicate anything further is wrong and so we chalk it up to a fussy child, fussy eater and hope he outgrows it in the next months.