Give The Baby All The Allergens

When my wife was changing Dmitri today, I noticed his poo looked white; almost chalky. Weird, right? We didn’t think much of it, but I took a picture of it for posterity’s sake. My wife said she’d look it up later on her handy dandy poo chart that she downloaded. When she finally got around to looking at the chart, it said white poo could be a sign of liver disease.

Shit.

We Googled the hell out of “white baby poo” and compared Dmitri’s poo to every chalkish, whiteish poo on the internet. It didn’t seem to be totally white like the babies with liver disease, but it was still pretty white. Naturally, we decided Dmitri has liver disease because that’s what Internet Doctors do, especially when one of them (yours truly) is a hypochondriac.

Fortunately, the pediatrician took one look at Dmitri’s poo and said it wasn’t liver disease. However, he said it might be he was having a reaction to milk-based formula, which we’d been feeding him more of lately. The pediatrician recommended we switch to a soy-based formula. Having the scare with the white poo was sort of a blessing in disguise because the doctor also recommended we start Dmitri on more solid foods, even the allergens like tree nuts and shellfish. The doctor’s daughter is some kind of renowned allergist who swears by feeding kids allergens early to make them more tolerant. Sounded good to us.

Now we’ve been pureeing pretty much everything we eat and giving some to Dmitri. It turns out he’s a big ol’ food lover just like his mom and dad. He scarfs down everything — carrots, peas, spaghetti, brioche bread, salmon, beef stew, you naaaaaame it! The only downside with all this solid food is baby is having solid food poo, which smells like normal human poo. But hey, if stinky poo is one more step toward Dmitri becoming a full-fledged human, we’ll take it.