Here comes trouble

Penny Jane is officially crawling! Not far--she peters out onto her tummy after about 5 or 6 "steps"--but she's definitely doing it. And sometimes she does it on hands and feet with that puffy cloth-diapered butt in the air. So cute.

And, just like Abby, at the same time as she learned to crawl, she started pulling herself up on furniture. She's not quite to the cruising stage, but she's very close. Her balance improved a thousand percent in about 48 hours, it was wild to see it happen so fast. And in fact, she stood for about 3 seconds on her own the other day.

She's also saying ma-ma-ma and we're pretty sure she's saying it to call me. And if you say it back to her slowly, you can see her studying your mouth, and then she'll mouth it back but not make the sound. It's so funny.

I took her to Dr. Jen the other day for her allergy testing. Dr. Jen uses applied kinesiology to test, rather than a blood draw or scratch test. She is also a chiropractor, so she did a chiro check on PJ and discovered that her T1 vertebrae was misaligned. That's the one associated with asthma, so I'm praying that was the cause of the asthma she's been suffering with every time that stupid cough comes around. Dr. Jen also found that the valve between her esophagus and stomach was weak and not closing all the way, and the stomach had come up a little bit through the valve. Apparently this is not unheard of, and it can cause--ta-da!--reflux! She said that was most likely what the problem was since, when she did the allergy testing, she found PJ was *not* allergic to dairy! (She is to corn and tomatoes, though.) She tested me as well and found that I'm not allergic to, but not properly digesting, dairy, wheat, strawberries, and avocado. She set me up with an enzyme to take when I eat those foods, so that should help. I was SO excited to start eating dairy again, but it's funny, I *really* notice I feel lousy after dairy now. Christian the awesome nutritionist taught us that wheat and dairy are inflammatory, and I really feel it with the dairy. I went out and bought ice cream and colby cheese and after servings of each I honestly didn't want anymore. Which is just as well, given their fat content (and sugar content in the ice cream).