Saturday, March 19, 2011

Blue dye still makes her cry

Sorry I haven't posted for a while. There wasn't much new to say. We've been really successful avoiding dyes in our food for quite a while. We've pretty much limited all the other petroleum based products too (artificial flavors, preservatives).

Then came St. Patrick's Day. The kindergarten teacher ran out of alternate snacks that I usually keep stocked for each classrom. So she sent me an email saying how bad she felt and did not want my daughter to miss out on the class treat. She thought since they were white cupcakes with white icing and only a little bit of green sprinkles that it would be OK. Let me tell you, it's been just "peachy".

There was the sobbing, sobbing, sobbing about everything the first night, then the "I don't want to sleep in my bed" routine in the middle of the night. She normally sleeps quite fine the whole past year when she's not on food dye. More "melt downs" followed today. It should run it's course by tomorrow.

I commented on the blue, even though the sprinkles were green, because I'm guessing it was yellow 5 or 6 along with blue 1 in the ingredients. We thought back to the day we banned blue, the last of the food colors to leave our diet. We had taken the kids to see Santa and let each of the three of them have a blue lollipop, since we had not seen blue to cause much trouble until then. We got home and all 3 kids started crying about nothing at the exact same time. Then they all continued to cry a lot randomly, on and off for the rest of the day with no apparent reason. It was enough for my husband to say, "enough...no more blue...ever."

It's kind of funny that we made it through the big red food holidays (Christmas and Valentines) with no trouble, as well as Halloween. Go figure it's the green one that gets us. Feel free to comment if blue makes your child cry too, or if your child ever has trouble sleeping after consuming food dyes. I like to let others know it's not just my family who experiences this strange phenomenom.