I Spy With My Little Eye...

... a little baby standing and starting to creep.

It seems like every time I turn around, Lily has pulled herself up to standing on something new. She's pretty proud of her new accomplishment.

And here's a little Lily update for you all: at her doctor's appointment today, she is now up to 12 lbs 8 oz!! This is the first time that she has ever broken 12 lbs! The formula seems to be working. We are so happy. She has had positive progress at each weekly weigh-in. It is such a relief to have the scale headed the right direction. And it's a relief for me, too, in another way. I was nervous to stop breastfeeding because then there was no turning back if the formula didn't work. It is a huge validation and relief to see that she's getting what she needs-- things I wasn't able to provide for her before, in this rare circumstance.

Not only is her weight coming up, but she just seems to be thriving all around. After a long time of no teeth, she now has two showing and two more starting to come in up top. Her hair is FINALLY starting to grow. Now that her body actually has nutrients, non-essential processes seem to be starting to pick up. And best of all, she is SO happy! Poor little thing has been in pain and probably majorly lacking energy for such a long time. Now she finally feels good and has energy and she smiles, jabbers, squeals, crawls around, climbs, etc. all day long. It's hard to keep up with her! It's like we have a different baby now. It is so nice to have her so happy and content!

Speaking of it being hard to keep up with her: we call Lily our little scavenger. She is crazy. She probably spends about 2/3 of her waking hours crawling around the house, picking up EVERYTHING she can see and trying to eat it. I vacuum and sweep and sweep and sweep. She still finds things!

This is Lily after one of her scavenging rounds this morning. Those are definitely pieces of a dead potato bug that she found in a corner of the kitchen floor. Sick. I take my eye off of her for one minute... The girl wants to eat!

The doctor had us take her off of all foods except for this new formula. This was sad news for Lily because she LOVED feeding herself cheerios, little pieces of fruit, puffs, etc. She seriously loved it. I think that now she makes up for it by her scavenging. She's not hungry - we try to give her a bottle and she refuses it. She just loves to feed herself. When we eat dinner, she crawls around the table in circles - kind of like a circling vulture - waiting to see if we drop anything. Poor baby. :) Hopefully she can start eating something else in a little while. No cheerios though. Haha.. Oh poor Lily.

In a few weeks, we'll have a check-in with her GI doctor and see how to proceed from here. She'll stay on the formula and we'll start the long, tedious process of slowly (like one new food every two weeks of so) introducing and monitoring new foods. We'll avoid the super allergenic foods like milk/milk products, soy, wheat, fish, nuts, etc. It'll be a little tricky to tell what works and what doesn't because she wasn't having typical allergic reactions that were visible. It was just weight loss and after things were really irritated, blood and mucous in her stool. When you're talking about ounces, weight loss is hard to monitor at home. But, we'll cross that bridge when we get there.

Anyways, she's doing great for now! Thanks for all of your concern and thoughts!