Archive for the ‘Health’ Category

Hardwood Floors

Saturday, May 23rd, 2009

Both of our girls have dust mite allergies, and their doctors have recommended that we remove the carpets in our house. This is all well and good, in theory, but getting it done is a different story. We got the go ahead from our landlord to remove the carpets from our  house. Of course, as long as we pay for it ourselves.

We started looking for contractors that could give us a decent bid, and that wouldn’t take too long to do the job. The lowest bid we could get was for around $2000. Of course, we would have to move all of our furniture to the garage and make scarse for about a week. The only problem is that we live in our house.

We thought about it, and we decided to do it ourselves, one room at a time. So far I’ve spent two weekends. One for the living room and the other for the dining room. It wasn’t too difficult. The hardest part was having to scrape off the bottom layer of carpet padding which was fused to the wood flooring. I’ve spoken to others who had similar experiences. They all shudder when I mention the burgundy carpet padding. Apparently, the people who installed the carpet just put the new carpet and padding over the old padding (circa 1970’s old). Probably because they didn’t feel like scraping it off themselves. Really? Thanks! Awesome. That stuff was like plaster in the high traffic area. I had to scrape it off on my hands and knees, with a putty knife.

After a whole day of scraping for each room, I rented a floor sander from the local Home Depot Pro. I only needed it for for less than four hours each time, so both rentals ended up costing about $100 together. The most costly pieces of equipment were the sand paper sheets for the floor sander. The sell them only by the sheet, for more than $6 each, and I needed about a dozen. The next time, I’ll buy the sand paper in bulk, online, ahead of time.

After sanding and vaccuming, I sealed the floor with three coats of water based polyurethane. We had the leave the rooms sealed off for about a week, each time, to let the polyurethane off gas. Now, we have nice shiny hardwood floors.

Posted in Allergy Diary, Home Improvement | 2 Comments »

Yay False Positives!

Thursday, February 21st, 2008

Nina is apparently not allergic to wheat and bananas, contrary to the results we got from her blood test two weeks ago. She had a skin scratch test done today, where no new allergies were found.

The milk, eggs and nuts trinity still remains, as far as we’re concerned. Maybe she’ll get over some or all of them when she’s older, but for now, it’s business as usual with our new meat eating vegan lifestyle.

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House of Sick

Friday, February 15th, 2008

All week, I’ve been staying home from work to take care of my three women. Although we got flu shots back in October — all aside from Nina, due to her egg allergy — Leila, Nina and Carrie have all caught some flu like virus: sneezing, nasal congestion, coughing, conjunctivitis, laryngitis, fever, body aches… oh yeah, and more yellowish/green snot than you could shake a stick at (cliché inspired by a tangent in a TVZ episode). Basically more than even NyQuil could handle.

Carrie’s been out of commission and the little girls are going a bit stir crazy — which happens everyday if they’re not out of the house by 11am. On Monday, I took them to the Zeum Carousel for four rides. They really loved the horses. Leila was intrigued by the giraffes and goats, but only from a distance. Nina didn’t care what animal she was on, as long as it was moving. There’s a 4 minute pause between rides, which to a 1 year old seems like an eternity. Leila didn’t want to switch horses, and Nina felt stuck on hers. What can you do?

On Tuesday, Wednesday and Thurday, I took them out to the back yard to push/pull them around on their respective bikes. This was good fun until Leila remembered there’s a hose in the back yard. She had a blast, repeatedly filling up a green watering jug, then emptying it into all of the gopher holes. Lets hope Mr. Gopher has flood insurance.

Then, finally, last night, like you hope it won’t happen to the last survivor in a sci-fi horror flick, the monster caught up with me. Mine is always the French film noir version, where the hero gets the shaft in the end. Despite all of the echinacea, goldenseal, zinc and all that homeopathic “immunity boosting” herbal stuff I’ve been ingesting all week, I caught the mega flu.

Posted in Child's Mind, Health | Comments Off

More allergies?!

Wednesday, February 6th, 2008

We got the results from Nina’s allergy blood test yesterday. It looks like she may have more allergies, to almonds, wheat and bananas. She has been eating bread and Cheerios pretty much every day, so knowing that, according to the allergist the positive result for wheat is probably a false positive. We’ve tried to give her bananas in the past, but she doesn’t really like them. As far as we can tell she hasn’t had any reactions from them. Maybe that one is a false positive as well.

Now we are in limbo again, waiting for the next skin scratch test, where hopefully, we can get some more conclusive information.

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Attack of the egg crumb

Wednesday, December 26th, 2007

To be nice to Leila, we made her a hard boiled egg yesterday. She use to love them, before we banned them from our house for Nina’s sake. Sure enough, as temperamental 3 year olds often do, she decided she didn’t really want much of it, an she just played with it, crumbling it on her plate.

Of course, Nina, the fastest crawler in the west, went right under Leila’s chair and picked up something and shoved it into her mouth. Carrie jumped on her and called me away from dish duty, and we tried to fish out what it was she had put in her mouth. I saw a very small yellow crumb, which looked like it could have been yolk, but it was too small to get out, and Nina was not very accommodating of our efforts, to say the least. Her six razor sharp incisors didn’t help the situation either.

So we spend the second half of Christmas day watching her. After an hour, her cheeks started getting a bit flushed, and became more so over the course of the afternoon. We gave her Benadryl. She also started having a hint of eczema all over her body. She was acting fine, and wasn’t itchy, as she had been with the flu shot attempt. She was also very tired and wanting to nap. We called the allergist, and surprisingly were able to get in touch with the on-call physician. By then she had fallen asleep, so he said to keep giving her Benadryl every 4 hours, and to wake her up every 15 throughout her nap. That was fun — waking up the girl I had just rocked to sleep, for 20 minutes.

In the end, she’s fine today. But eggs are officially banned from the house.

Posted in Allergy Diary, Food | 1 Comment »

Egg Allergies and Flu Vaccines

Monday, December 10th, 2007

Nina went to get a flu shot the other day. Since she’s had a positive skin test for an allergy to egg, Carrie had to take her to the allergist’s so he could do some more tests before administering the vaccine. Unfortunately, Nina had another positive reaction when the allergist give her a small dose of diluted vaccine.  She started getting flushed cheeks, and red spots quickly appeared all over her body, so they gave her a shot of epinephrine, and a hefty dose of anti-histamines, on the spot.

In the end, she only got a fifth of the normal vaccine dose. This will probably not help her produce the necessary antibodies to be considered vaccinated, so the rest of us need to get the flu shot, to limit the possibility of one of us giving the flu to Nina.

After her flu shot, poor Leila was telling anyone who would listen, with a serious, matter of fact tone, that “shots are no fun.” And our little night demon Nina, after her triple or quadruple dose of benadryl, and her epinephrine shot, slept through the night — almost.

Posted in Allergy Diary, Child's Mind, Health | Comments Off

The trinity of food allergies

Tuesday, November 27th, 2007

So this just in… my 10 month old girl, Nina, has been diagnosed with three food allergies: milk, eggs, peanuts.

This was, at first, devastating news. Will the allergies fade away? Peanuts, not likely, but milk and eggs, maybe. What kind of milk? What part of milk? Don’t know. The allergist just said to stop having any dairy, eggs or nus in our house. We are now living the life of meat eating vegans, without nuts.

This food allergy trinity makes it very challenging to buy prepared or packaged foods. Everything has the small fine print disclaimer: processed in a facility that also processes milk, eggs and/or peanuts and tree nuts. This little bit of copy means that box, or bag, or can of food is off limits. It might as well be an anthrax popsicle, as far as my 10 month old is concerned, or so the allergist wants us to believe. The trinity also makes impossible to eat food from restaurants, because they all use butter, or cheese, or cream, of nuts, or eggs in some way or another.

So, we’ve been cooking — everything — from scratch. It’s good because it’s healthier, but it’s very time consuming. Maybe we’ll have to get a box freezer and cook in bulk.

Keep an eye out for recipes that are milk, egg, and nut free.

Posted in Allergy Diary | 2 Comments »