Introducing...

Shelby, the Yellow-nosed Reindeer

(Click for a closer look)

Yes, I said yellow and no, you don't need to adjust the color of your computer screen. You might have already noticed but Shelby really does have a bit of a yellow-ish tint to her skin, especially her nose.

A few months back,I was a bit perplexed when I started noticing her yellowish nose. At first I only saw it when I viewed pics from our then,new camera. I just figured it was the camera. Then a few days later, while out on a walk with Shelby, an old Scottish lady asked me if Shelby was jaundiced. Shelby had newborn jaundice for a week or so right after she was born and it had been long gone since then,as far as I knew. She then asked me if I fed Shelby a lot of carrots. I answered no pretty quickly feeling confident it wasn't carrots. Before we moved here, I had made sure to buy a wide variety of baby food with all kinds of veggies and fruits. Besides, since we had moved to Vancouver, Shelby had been mostly breastfeed with the exception of a few snacks and jar of various flavors of baby food,IE, Chicken Noodle,Turkey &Veggies, Beef&Veggies,Lasagna,Spaghetti,etc, for dinner each night. She's eaten carrots a few times before, but definately not enough to make her skin turn yellow. Or so I thought...

When I got home, it was really bugging me that I wasn't the only one now who noticed her yellow coloring. So I immediately went to the cupboard and pulled out all her baby food searching the ingredients on every can. Turns out almost every single jar of baby food we had read as follows, "Ingredients: Water, CARROTS,..." then beef, or turkey or chicken and so on. Even the Lasagna and Spaghetti listed carrots as the second ingredient! Carrots must give some good flavor or be pretty dang cheap as a filler. I felt so stupid and pretty guilty for being so oblivious to it. But who could blame me? Not one jar had a picture of carrots on it! To ease my mind and just to make sure the cause of her yellow nose was the carrots, I googled "yellow nose" and found this article on Wikipedia, CLICK--->"Carotenoderma" (I don't know what's up with the black bar across the baby's eyes. I guess her parents didn't want her identity disclosed-lol) Thank goodness for google parenting and Wikipedia! What would I ever do without them?

Thankfully carotenoderma is harmless and only temporary. Hopefully it will go away soon, as we have run out of baby food and are now feeding her what we eat, for the most part.

So long yellow-nose!

And now a brief clip of Shelby's latest accomplishment,