Hereditary

As you may or may not realize, celiac disease is hereditary.  After I was diagnosed it took us another year to finally realize that 2 of my 3 kids were also affected by gluten.  The first to be taken off of it was my youngest who was in preschool at the time.  We were camping with cousins about 6 months after my diagnosis and I realized that he was unusually sick the entire time we were camping!  I finally realized at the end of the 4 day trip that he was eating all of their snack food and thus getting sick.  As soon as we took him off gluten he stopped getting sick and felt so much better.  

My oldest son, who was in 3rd grade at the time, didn’t get taken off gluten for almost another 6 months.  I finally realized that he was getting sick and wasn’t telling me.  I told him he needed to stop eating gluten, which he did at home, but he would cheat at school when other kids brought in birthday treats.  After a couple months of being mostly gluten free, he realized that every time he cheated he would feel awful and get sick.  He made the decision to go completely gluten free and has never turned back!  Now when kids bring in treats he just tells me when he gets home and has an equivalent GF treat.  My youngest just has a package of Mi-Del “oreos” stored with his teacher and she can give him one as a substitute.

You should know that I did have all my kids take the blood test screening and they all came back negative, well within the normal range.  It is only through trial and error that we discovered they too have an allergy.  Their tests probably came back negative because I didn’t have any gluten filled food to give them before their tests.  Also, like I mentioned earlier, the only true way to diagnose Celiac is with an endoscopy which they don’t like to perform on kids.  Since I know I have an allergy and I know it is hereditary we decided it wasn’t worth making them eat gluten and get sick just to have a positive test result.