The comments are taking a while to load so I thought we needed a new thread to post on. This effectively works as our message board, so post away and we'll answer what we can. Although if your question relates to something already on the blog, say for example highchairs, then if you wouldn't mind I'd be grateful if you could do a search and then post on that pre-existing highchairs thread then everyone will be able to read it in situ, as it were. And I chose highchairs as a random example, by the way. I'm sure there must be a better example... Oh! Allergies. Allergies is a much better example as that Actually Makes Sense for everything to be together.

Anyway, thanks for joining in, I appreciate all the input.

To tomatoes. Now my friend Jen, queen of all things allergic, will be able to attest to the fact that I suggested this might be the case some months ago. Babybear has aways been utterly fascinated and beguiled by tomatoes right up until the moment she puts them in her mouth, at which point she winces as if scalded, shudders and puts them down again. Game girl that she is, however, she tends to repeat this about ten times during the course of the meal.

So I remember saying to Jen that I wondered if she might have an intolerance to them and was actually feeling a reaction on her tongue rather than just a simple dislike of the taste. I never pushed them on her, just ate them all up myself, as far as I was concerned she liked cooked tomatoes and that was enough for me.

Weirdly, though, at 17 months old I think a proper intolerance is coming to the fore. If tomato touches her lips or face she now gets marks that look for all the world like nettle stings, all white and raised and surrounded by quite livid red patches. They don't come up quite immediately and they do hang around for an hour or so afterwards. Normally she doesn't have the same reaction to cooked tomatoes but I have noticed a certain redness once or twice recently and she does appear to be going off tomato-based sauces. Which is a right pain, I can assure you, as I like nothing more...

Anyway, what now? Do I ignore it? It doesn't seem to bother her but it bothers me. Will she become allergic to other things? Will she become allergic to tomatoes, even? Is there anything I can do at this stage? Please help, I am utterly ignorant of this sort of thing.

I'm cutting and pasting this from a comment as it's really interesting. Anyone got any thoughts?