Up in the air...

... and trying hard to rest in the knowledge that God knows this all and I don't need to fret. See, last week I found out, via letter, that my midwife may be moving to work closer to home. Earlier this week I had a regular check-up and had the opportunity to speak with her about this possibility. The practice I go to has two midwives - one of which is currently part-time, and two OBs (I think - I don't really see them). So, if my midwife does leave then I think the other midwife will go back to full-time. Basically, at this moment I have no idea who is going to attend the birth of Baby Rose, and even no idea which hospital I'll be delivering at (though, I think it'll be one of two). So, by my next appt., in less than 3 weeks, I will at least know if my midwife has stayed or not. We'll go on from there I guess. This could totally have the potential to throw me into a state of stress and frustration, but I am trying really hard to surrender all of that and just rest in the not knowing and trust that the Lord has known all of this would happen and has it figured out. Jamie's response to all of this??? "Hey, I've been there for the first two, and even caught Riley! I can just catch this one too!" :) I love my husband.

***

Wednesday we took Riley to see a pediatric allergist. This appointment brought more questions than answers. Back in October Riley had some blood work done and we were told by his pediatrician that the blood work revealed an allergy to milk protein. As we have worked with his diet the past couple of months, this diagnosis has seemed to ring true, except, his symptoms have not gone away completely, and in recent weeks he will have bad days (this might be gross, sorry - but we would consider a bad day where he has a lot of explosive diarrhea - something that might be normal for a newborn, but not a 16 mos. old who eats all solid food!) even when we know he's had NO exposure to milk protein. So... at the allergist they did skin testing and they all came back negative - including milk. So... as the allergist said, he will not have a life-threatening reaction to milk, but if his body does better off of it, than it's fine to keep avoiding it.

We are left with a few questions. Why did his condition improve SO drastically when we did our initial "get rid of milk protein" campaign? Why does he still have way more "bad days" each week then we are comfortable with, sometimes seeming to correlate with an accidental ingestion of milk protein, other times not!? Is something serious going on? Does he simply have a "sensitivity" to milk protein, or was the blood work and skin testing not accurate enough to give the whole picture??? We just don't know!

So, at this point we are going to keep a detailed journal of Riley's daily input and output so that when we have our follow-up appointment with the pediatric GI doc next month we will hopefully have some insight from our end of things to offer.

Please pray for us. I know that Riley's condition is not life-threatening and he is growing/developing just fine - for this we are SO thankful! And yet, dealing with his "bad days" is hard. We know his tummy hurts on those days and it's not fun going through multiple outfits some days because his diarrhea is SO bad. All I know is something is not right and things are not normal. I just want to be able to fix it for Riley.

So, those are the updates for now. Pretty up in the air for both baby and Me and Riley, but we are trusting that God is working on our behalf and all will be for His glory!