Fire's Allergic to My Stubborness

   As they say, pride goeth before the fall. In this case, that would be my personal pride at how well Fire has been transitioning to real food and the fall would be my frustration at how he suddenly changed his mind and only wanted to eat baby food.
   While we were on vacation, we decided to try Fire on "real" food and started feeding him from our plates and he took right to it. We would actually have trouble getting food into him fast enough to keep him happy. He ate chicken, fish, oatmeal, edamame, all kinds of fruit, eggs, really anything that we put in his mouth. He would eventually get tired of chewing, or at least just start tonguing food back out, and then we would feed him a container of baby food and he'd be happy.
   I was ecstatic! No picky kids here- my kid eats what we eat- nah, nah, na, nah, nah. I was bragging about it, "Fire ate a whole piece of toast and half a banana for breakfast!". And then he stopped. One day last week, he just stopped eating real food. Everything except grapes and cereal was spit back out. I got frustrated and said, "Fine, let him be hungry" while D took over and filled him up on baby food. I don't cave to Sky on food and I wasn't about to let Fire get away with it either. I was going to be a tough Mom and my kid was going to be better off for it, gosh darnit!
   The next night, after making myself frustrated by trying to get Fire to eat chili and cornbread for dinner, D noticed a rash on his trunk and chin as he got Fire ready for bed. He called me up to look at it, and sure enough, Fire had hives. A quick call to hospital confirmed that it was probably a food allergy. We gave Fire some Benedryl and wrote down everything that he'd eaten that night in case one of them had caused the allergy. When we mentioned the hives to Florina, she said that she'd seen them when she came into work the day before but hadn't known to tell us about them.
   I started banging my head against a metaphorical wall as things became a little clearer. Fire had probably stopped eating real food because he'd had an allergic reaction to something. His body was telling him to stop putting things in it that it didn't like. And of course, I attributed it to stubbornness and decided that I had to assert my will over his. Once again, the lesson that Everying is Not About Me was driven home with a sledgehammer.
   For two days, until the hives cleared up entirely, we fed Fire nothing but baby foods that he'd had before. Eventually he started chewing on the spoon when we put it into his mouth, so we started giving him real food again, and he's been just fine ever since. We don't know what might have caused the allergy and we're keeping an eye on him in case it happens again, but he's back to eating just about anything we feed him (tofu and bok choy one night and beans and chicken another). Not that I'm bragging or anything.

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