After Easter

So we came home after Easter and decided to take colour out of our diet. I was still researching Feingold but wasn't quite ready to go all the way with it yet. The week after we decided to take colour out of our diet though Aslynn informed us that they were doing an experiment at school and were going to be trying a different type of gum every day for the next week to test different qualities of it. I went in to talk to her teacher and gave permission for the gum but wanted the teacher to know what we were doing so that she wouldn't be giving Aslynn any other treats.

The conversation I had with her was enlightening. It seemed that she had been having food problems for the last year and had finally sought out a Natural Path who did a blood test on her. The results came in that she could no longer have gluten, tartrazine (Yellow #5), and a few different citrus fruits. This was another confirmation to me that Feingold might work but I still wasn't ready to jump on board.
I was also e-mailing back and forth with blogger who I have been reading who had started Feingold with her family. One of the things she said to me was this:

My totally unsupported theory is that if you have a difficult baby who has a lot of trouble sleeping etc, then it is probably something in the way he is wired. But if you had a fairly easy baby who suddenly starts acting terrible around age 2 - ie, when they start eating people food - then it is probably diet. Again that advice is worth what you payed for it, but that's my theory.

That was a new thought for me. Judah had been my easiest baby, until he was close to 2. Then we started to wonder what had happened to our sweet child. He also started to have night terrors several times a week. He would wake up two, three, four times a night between 10:00pm and 1:00am. He would scream and cry and nothing would calm him down. Touching him would only make it worse so I would often carry him upstairs as he screamed and fought me because I was touching him. The I would place him in the corner of the couch and he would scream for about 10-15 min before he started to calm down and I would finally be able to cuddle him and calm him down and put him back to bed. Then we would repeat that another couple times in a night.

Despite all the signs I still wasn't willing to go all the way with Feingold. I wanted to just start with artificial colour and see what would happen. We agreed that we would give it one month.

We never went back.

There were several errors as we figured it out, and also during holidays. No one could deny though that Judah was calmer. He was concentrating better, could follow directions better, wasn't screaming as much. And another big thing- the night terrors went away.

And yet, sometimes he would still fly off the handle, be physically unable to sit still, make unstoppable noises with his mouth.
Over the summer we began to admit that as much as taking colour out had helped him that there still seemed to be something bothering him. In September we took the plunge and ordered the Feingold materials.