Timmy and Allergies

A lot of people have asked us how and when we will know if Timmy has food allergies like David. David is allergic to: dairy, eggs, wheat, rye, barley, all nuts (tree nuts and peanuts), sunflower, sesame, and flax seeds (and their expellar-pressed oils), goat's milk, and fur and feathered animals.
The short answer: it's a waiting game.
Newborns mostly have their mother's immune system upon birth, so if you test them for allergies (either by blood or skin prick testing) you would get results that mirror the mother's immune system and don't necessarily indicate the child's future allergies. David's first allergy blood test was done when he was about seven months old and we've been told that allergy testing done before six months of age is usually useless.
Even though we can't test Timmy directly, we are looking for signs that his body is reacting in a manner indicative of allergies. Some symptoms of food allergies include severe digestive difficulties (projectile vomiting, diarrhea, constipation), congestion, and eczema.
David never had any severe digestive difficulties, which is part of the reason why his food allergies went undiagnosed for an extended period of time. When he was about four months old we changed him from dairy to soy formula. After about a week I gave him one bottle of dairy formula and noticed immediately that he was cranky, congested and, later, gassy. It was enough to convince me that he was at least lactose intolerant.
However, David's major symptom of his allergic disease was and is his eczema. It started when he was about a month old and kept getting worse and worse until at about three months of age he ended up in the ER with severe, infected eczema covering about 75% of his body. From then until he was nine months old we struggled every day to keep his eczema under control using steroids, antibiotics and antihistamines.
Hindsight 20-20 we see a lot more clearly that David was struggling and how we could have prevented so much of his suffering. We are so much more educated now about allergic disease in young children. This is one of the reasons we decided to have another child even though there is such a high likelihood that Timmy will have allergic disease - we know so much more now that we feel very strongly that no other child of ours will ever suffer the way David did.
Timmy had his first bottle, dairy formula, on February 24th. By about March 10th or so we noticed that he was developing some dry redness on his cheeks, similar to what David had when he was an infant. Over that weekend I started using Vanicream, a non-prescription lotion we use to treat David's eczema, on Timmy's cheeks and on March 15th we switched him from dairy to soy formula. Almost immediately his cheeks became baby soft again.
All of this means Timmy might have an allergy to dairy. He might also just have eczema and the timing of the change from dairy to soy might be a coincidence. He seems a lot less gassy and irritated with the soy formula, but that might indicate a dairy intolerance, not a dairy allergy (intolerance and allergy are two VERY different things ... you might get have digestive upset with intolerance, but you can't die - sorry, one of my biggest pet peeves has become people who claim a food allergy when what they have is an intolerance, it's like crying wolf, only my son could pay the price for their lie, but I really should talk about this in a whole other post...). If he is allergic to dairy we have to watch him because 50% of the time if you are allergic to dairy you'll be allergic to soy too. Just because David isn't allergic to soy doesn't mean that Timmy will follow the same pattern.
So, we are watching and waiting. But right now, we are not worrying. Timmy is healthy, happy (you should see his smiles! and you will ... soon, I promise), thriving, and responding quickly to Vanicream. This weekend my in-laws are coming for a visit. While Jesse is here I will give Timmy a bottle of dairy formula and watch how he reacts. This should tell me, like it did with David, whether we'll keep Timmy off dairy for now. I'll keep everyone posted.