Mistake on top of mistake

Okay.......I blogged yesterday about Jennica's consumption of a bagel on Friday morning. A regular bagel. Full of gluten. And the following rash and beastly behavior. Due to the rash, she licked her lips all weekend, which resulted in chapped skin around her mouth. Lovely.

Anyway, since chapped lips are generally rather slow to heal and they really DO look nasty and she's been picking at them a bit and I really don't want them to turn into a bloody mess.......last night at bedtime I put some carmex on her. Due to the sensory feel of stuff on her lips, she doesn't tolerate it well, so she didn't end up with very much. And part of it ended up more on her left cheek than on her lips.

This morning, she woke up with her lips and mouth area covered in little red dots. Sigh. I went back and double-checked the little carmex container and there is nothing specifically there that is known to me to be a gluten-containing substance but, obviously, SOMETHING in the carmex kicked off a reaction. She's out of school this week anyway due to some teacher training and basketball tournament, so she's just been hanging out here with me all day.

Sigh..........some days this truly is exhausting. Even when I THINK I know what I'm doing, we find out a different ingredient that doesn't suggest gluten, but DOES contain gluten. (Like caramel color, or EDTA, or everything in the world that is rolled in gluten but not required by the FDA to disclose it....like raisins). The cosmetics products are truly a nightmare. We've switched her over to gluten-free/casein-free soap and shampoo, etc. but she really needs to be using GFCF soaps at school/day care also. We haven't even started that battle yet, and I'm not sure we will. Is it really realistic to expect her teachers to follow her around THAT closely all day to make sure she is using soap we have provided? Maybe I'll change my mind at some point, but at the moment, that sounds incredibly invasive to me. Talk about being "the nightmare parent"........

So I guess carmex is off our list.