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I have celiac and it appears to run in my family (symptom wise) though has not been confirmed. My MIL also has what her dr. calls a "wheat allergy" that may or may not be celiac. She and DH both do much better when GF. My plan is to not expose LO to gluten until they are old enough to tell me, "My tummy hurts!" I spent too many years as a child with "tummy aches" that couldn't be remedied. But once they are old enough, I will, in a controlled way, expose LO to small amounts of gluten and see how it goes. Any GI symptoms and it's off. Any food allergy/intolerance beforehand and it's off.

I just don't want them to feel icky all the time like I did.

Thanks for all the info, Ladies! It will be interesting to see how all of this plays out for us, I had the blood test when I was about 9 and came up positive genetically, but had no symptoms or inflammatory response at that time so I didn't do gluten free. I became symptomatic after an unrelated serious illness about 3 years ago (age 32), and since I knew what to watch out for I got retested and then started the diet immediately. Because I was very healthy with "latent" or unsymptomatic celiac for so long, I'm hesitant to rely on blood test alone when deciding what to feed baby girl.

@Pirouette: Yes there's quite some evidence that introducing gluten early for "high risk children" (as in: they have a parent with CD) is better than waiting to introduce gluten. There was a major increase in CD cases in Sweden in the 90s when the national health commission changed their recommendation to starting gluten later.

@hellobeeboston: We cook GF too. He gets a "normal" toast in the morning and eats at daycare what ever they provide that day. So that's when he really eats gluten. Dinners are GF except for when there is bread etc. involved.

@hellobeeboston: @Pirouette: We are now not testing anymore. The only reason we would test again is if there were reasons to believe that something was amiss. So very much like your Ped says no more testing because he is thriving and has normal poops etc. We only tested while he was under a year old because the poop especially while still BF wouldn't show signs. The second test was at nearly a year old because he had really weird poops for over 2 weeks and he was not feeling well but it turned out to just be a stomach bug.

We'll definitely be sticking with this approach with No'2 too. It's so nice to just be out and about and just feed him foods without having to think twice.

@Pirouette: I don't think it can hurt. The one thing they said over and over was to start with minimal amounts and gradually increase. In the really early days he didn't get anything besides BM and about a tablespoon's worth of that BM & flour mix. I made the mix really liquidy (is that even a word?) so it was easy for him to swallow. It was still often a struggle to make him eat it though. In retrospective with him having no issues I'm glad we made him though.

@hellobeeboston: Yes it might have been her Ped since waiting with the introduction of gluten was the common recommendation a couple of years back. It hasn't been too long that the medical community is changing their stance on it.

At least that was my impression when I read up on A LOT of studies while deciding how to proceed with LO.

thanks for all of the info ladies! I am currently 30 weeks and have a gluten allergy- discovered almost 2 years ago after 28 years of constant issues!

My doc and I have talked briefly about introduction of gluten, I know it is different then CD, as it is an allergy for me. I am also allergic to tree nuts (hazelnuts in particular) and pineapple. DH is allergic to tree nuts (brazil and hazelnuts). So we will have some interesting food introductions I am sure! I hope to start our baby on gluten, and just watch for any issues. I eat gf, dh eats gluten most of the time.

My biggest concern is like @Pumuckl mentioned- feeding her gluten and me not sharing! That will be hard I am sure! How do you ladies do it? Just not share, and do your kids just accept that as normal?

@MsBadger: that's an interesting read. I love that paragraph:
So, different studies have come to different conclusions on this question, but let me simplify: Don’t introduce gluten before 4 months of age (and there are lots of good reasons for this beyond the celiac issue). Waiting too long beyond 6-7 months may increase celiac risk, but more importantly, delaying your baby’s first taste of gluten doesn’t seem to be protective.

@MrsScottish: I just had to remind myself to not lick my fingers. We never spoon shared no matter what he had (seems to increase risk for the child's teeth - if I remember correctly) so that helped. If we wants to share his Pretzel I'll tell him something along the lines of "ah thank you but mummy can't have that" and usually he's satisfied with that answer.