Hives

Yes, hives.  Yuck.

On Monday morning Finn woke up from a nap with what I thought was a bug bite on his temple.  No biggie.  The kid had bug bites at the Lake and was fine, they usually disappeared within a couple of hours.  This one stuck around all morning.  And then when he woke up from his nap.....BAM!

All of the sudden they were everywhere!  I hurried down to the office and Google'd 'hives' and found pictures that looked exactly like Finn's skin.  Of course, I called the doctor's office but by 2:30 in the afternoon they didn't have any appointments left.  The nurse recommended that we come into the walk-in that night but magically the hives suddenly started to disappear (which prompted much picture taking on my part, just in case we ended up at the doctor's office with a hive-less kid).  We decided not to go to the walk-in since Finn was suddenly hive-less, only to have them re-appear around the time the walk-in opened.  Since he was a little cranky (apparently cutting two teeth and having hives will do that to a kid) we decided not to wait the long wait at the walk-in and get him some Benadryl instead.

So what caused the hives?  Your guess is as good as mine.  At this point we have it narrowed down to about 4 things.

1)  I had fed him yogurt for the first time on Sunday afternoon.  I hadn't really worried about it because he'd already had cheese and Baby Mum-Mum's have skim milk powder in them so I was pretty sure we were safe with dairy.

2)  Then on Monday morning I gave him a new cereal recipe.  I'd been searching for something inspiring to feed our picky eater on Sunday night and came up with this oh-so-simple Banana Mash recipe - 1/2 banana, 3 Tbsp oatmeal cereal, 1 tsp molasses, 2 Tbsp water.  Sounds yummy, right?  Finn would beg to differ.  He did ingest a couple of bites and molasses was something he hadn't ever had, but again, didn't really worry about it....because what are the odds that something wonky will happen with stinkin' molasses?!

3)  When I was talking to the pharmacist on Monday night, she asked if he had been on any new medications recently.  Why yes, he had - amoxicillan.  Her opinion was that the hives were most likely a delayed reaction to the antibiotics.  So even though he had finished the antibiotics on Saturday, it was still quite probable that he was reacting to them.  Our family doctor disagreed with this theory when we saw her on Tuesday (after the hives magically reappeared Tuesday morning) but agreed that we would be careful if we ever had to give him amoxicillan again.

4)  A friend of Finn's came down with a respiratory infection and had hives.  He was mouthing all of her toys just a couple of days before she had hives.  Therefore, I wouldn't be entirely surprised if he picked up her germs and got himself infected.  I've since had others tell me that their own kids have had hives with different viruses.

So who knows???  It's anybody's guess as to why the poor little man had them.  We will definitely be more careful as we continue to introduce new foods but hopefully that's the last we'll ever see of them!