There was a new allergy identifed, however: sunflower seeds. This was surprising because she’s been around them for so long, as a peanut butter replacement, and she’s even had them in a snack bar once. Yet she’s never seemed to react to them. We will probably test her again.

Her other allergies are as we know unchanged. She’s still allergic to other tree nuts, eggs, and dairy.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.