Everything Update

Hi there! It's been a while since you heard from us, but I think most of you know us in person anyway so you know what's been going on. First, I'll fill you in on Logan's situation. Logan was diagnosed with Eosinophilic Esophagitis. It's a mouthful, and it's a pretty new disease so we don't even understand it totally. The apfed.org website has a nice video for kids that explains it well, staring Gus the esophagus, and Phil the eosinophil: Gus and Phil

So we (mostly Kami) has been bouncing around between the GI doctor, the allergist, and the nutritionist for the past few months. We have found out about lots more allergies that Logan has, including cow's milk, chicken, beef, pork, potato, coconut, beans, garlic(no!), and lots more. He can still have rice, turkey, white fish, and most fruits and vegetables. The food has been the biggest challenge, but as we lose more and more foods it almost becomes simpler, because when you only have 8-10 foods that you can eat, well, that's what you eat! We should all be so lucky ;)

We also have some elemental formula that we are supposed to be feeding him. We have been giving him about 6 oz per day, not more because he doesn't care for it by itself, he has to have it mixed with rice milk or smoothies, and because he is still eating quite a bit on his own. That is where we really lucked out with Logan, he loves eating and still eats just about anything we give him. We make sure to give him lots of natural proteins like turkey, fish, and quinoa, and we feel like we're doing a pretty good job keeping him fed. Our original nutritionist wanted us to give him 6-8 oz of formula at each meal, but sorry lady, if we can keep him eating real food as much as possible and still have him maintaining a healthy weight then we're going to do it. We recently got a new nutritionist who is much more on board with this line of thinking.

The positive side of all this is that Logan is totally oblivious to his problems. He is still the happy boy he has always been. He runs and plays like anyone else and doesn't know that he is any different. Kami deserves a lot of credit for how well she has adapted our eating habits to fit Logan's needs. Now we eat rice pasta with ground turkey meat sauce, or marinated albacore tuna, or turkey tacos. We eat buckwheat blueberry pancakes or quinoa porridge for breakfast. All told the new foods are delicious. We are excited to start reintroducing foods that he is allergic to in the near future. Just because he has a mild allergy to a food doesn't necessarily mean it is a trigger for his EE. So as long as they don't aggravate his EE we can add those foods back to his diet. Hooray!

Meanwhile, Eli is doing great. We try to make sure he doesn't get overlooked with everything going on with Logan, but he does get a little jealous sometimes. Some of it is just typical age-related differences. It's hard for him when we say "Eli, you need to share with your brother" but two minutes later say "sorry Eli, but Logan doesn't understand sharing yet." Overall he is a great kid. He enjoys nursery at church, he loves singing songs and reading books, and, when I'm home, he continually asks me "Dad, will you play with me?" We play dinosaurs, cars, trains, whatever. One of his favorite games is "houses." Basically one of us pretends to be asleep while the other sneaks around playing Santa and leaves "presents", after which the second one wakes up and we all enjoy the gifts.

So that's how things are going right now. That ended up longer than I thought, but oh well. I'll try to post some pictures soon.