Babies can break your heart

Pretty much from the moment I found out I was pregnant, I've been dreading the day my baby would get sick. I mean, I'm not a nurse. How will I know what is wrong? How will I know how to make her feel better?

And it has happened already. Kind of.

Ammely hasn't been sick in the *cough, cough* *runny nose* kind of way. She broke out in a rash.

At first I thought it was baby acne. This alone made me sad, my baby had perfect skin. So soft. No birth marks or any weird discoloration.

And then it got worse.
Over a few days it spread from one cheek to the other, to her chest, back of her neck, and top of her back.
It ended up looking like this:

Definitely not baby acne.

It was AWFUL and it broke my heart. No mother wants to see her baby like that. Good news is it didn't seem to bother her at all. She was maybe a little more fussy than she used to be, but overall still a pretty good baby. But it just LOOKED painful and I figure nobody's skin ought to look like that - painful or no. So I called the pediatrician and got an appointment. Poor little girl has eczema.
What causes this you ask? Most likely an allergy.

To what you ask? Well, that is the million dollar question.

It could be something touching her skin. So we have now changed all of our laundry detergents, bath soaps, and hand soaps.

It could be something she's eating (via me, her food source). Thus, I've been on a no wheat, no dairy, no nuts diet for a couple of weeks.

It could be heat. And we live in Arizona. And it's the end of May. No bueno.

Per the doctor's orders, we've been regularly applying hydrocortizone and some baby eczema lotion which has cleared her skin up considerably. Some days you can't tell anything happened at all. Other days it flares up a little bit again.

So now we're on the quest to find the source of her irritation and praying that she grows out of this particular irritation/allergy. And I have begun the fearful journey into motherhood and all of the correlating unknowns.