Miranda gets a rash on her face a couple times a week. You can see it on the eight-month picture of the two of them. Despite being a pediatrician, I’m not sure if the rash is eczema or irritant contact dermatitis. If it is contact dermatitis, we’re not sure what the irritant is. She often licks her lips, but that only explains the rash around her mouth. Sometimes the rash goes up to her cheeks. She could have eczema, especially given that there are a lot of allergies on both sides of the family. She doesn’t scratch the rash though, which you usually see with eczema, and she doesn’t have the rash anywhere else on her body.

Either way, there’s really only two main things to do about it:

• moisturize like heck
• reduce any possible trigger

We slather Miranda’s face with Aquaphor every day after her bath, and sometimes I’ll put some on in the middle of the day. This is why her face and bangs appear greasy in some of our pictures.

As for triggers, we use “hypoallergenic” everything, including laundry detergent and baby shampoo. The other big category is foods, which has been more difficult. We considered stopping all solids, but Miranda loves solid foods, and is starting to drink less milk during the day anyway. So we decided to eliminate the most allergenic foods, at least for the next week or so, see if her rash improves, and then slowly reintroduce them.

Here’s a list of foods we’ve eliminated from her diet: wheat (bread, noodles, cookies, biscuits, crackers), soybean (tofu), fish, nuts, egg, corn, citrus (grapefruit, orange, lemon), onion, cabbage, berries, pork, tomatoes, spices, peas.

Doing this elimination diet has made me realize that everything has wheat in it, like mixed cereal, and all the baby cookies that Miranda loves. I miss giving Miranda boiled egg yolk in the mornings too. She loved the interesting texture and would always give me a big smile with egg yolk crumbling out of her mouth. Anyway, now she’s mostly eating barley cereal and different fruits and vegetables. This weekend we really wanted to give her some kind of finger food, since she loves picking up little bits (see the blog entry “Miranda AKA Roomba“), so we cheated on the diet and gave her Cheerios. The good thing about Cheerios is that it’s made out of oat flour, but the last ingredient is wheat starch, so it’s still a no-no for the truly wheat allergic.

I don’t think we’re going to find that she’s allergic to any particular food, but it’s probably a good idea to be careful with what we give her. Also, I didn’t mention any medication for her face, which essentially consists of steroid creams, but the face isn’t a great place for the cream, especially since she licks around her lips and rubs her eyes. I figure as long as she doesn’t scratch her face, she doesn’t really need any medication.