Again....

I'm going to start with a cute picture because, yup, I'm talking about stool again. What can I say? We're a little obsessed.

The short version: the blood was gone. Now it's back. We went nearly a week without seeing it and we thought, great. The doctors told us to finish out the month-long course of steroids and then we'd be good. Starting mid-week last week, we starting seeing blood again. A little spot here or there isn't anything we even comment on anymore, but this is more than that. We're not quite where we were, but it's also not so minimal we can ignore it.

The good news: Blaise's blood counts are fine. Whatever this is isn't inducing anemia or electrolytic imbalance. The question is: What is it? As an allergic reaction to the new solids goes, it's weirdly timed. It started after 10 days on rice cereal but before introducing apples. If it's an allergy to the Elecare, why would it go away and come back while she was on it. We were still giving the steroids, so wasn't an absence of those that caused it. The only thing I can think of was that she was off her vitamins for a while and is back on them, but that doesn't make any sense either. If this is all being caused by the same thing (which would be parsimonious), she didn't start the vitamins until after the first bleeding episodes back in May. It could just be that this is the way Blaise's gut responds to any kind of irritant. This is going to make introducing more foods tricky. How will we know if the blood is a response to a food or just a "Blaise thing"? The scientist in me wants to isolate a cause and manipulate one variable at a time. The mom in me wants to have fun trying new things. The scientist will probably win on this one. There's no reason to ditch reason here.

In the meanwhile, our big girl is still doing her thing. Sitting, eating, playing, laughing, rolling and making the other stuff easy.