I love peanut butter, I love peanuts, I love anything made with peanut butter. In a galaxy far far away, we kept three different jars of peanut butter in our pantry. One for me, one for Blake, and one for the dogs. I could seriously eat peanut butter in some form every day...two years ago. My sweet little sugar plum, Avery, is allergic to peanuts. (As just a funny little aside, I told someone she was allergic to peanut butter, please don't give her any, and she said "Wow, that's weird, it she allergic to peanuts?" Blink. Blink. What? ) When she was a little over a year old, I gave her a lick of peanut butter from a spoon of PB I was enjoying to see if she too would fall in the ranks and also be a PB fanatic. Instead she got a swollen lip that looked somewhat cartoonish. We studied it, wondered if maybe she ran into something, fell down, but in the end gave her a dose of Benadryl to be on the safe side and it went away. She had a well-child visit shortly after this incident and I brought it up to our pediatrician, she suggested we do some blood work and see if she had any allergies. The blood work showed high allergy to peanuts, and she wrote us a prescription for an epipen and counseled me have benadryl on me at all times, she asked if I'd like to speak with a dietitian and I told her I'd talk to myself (Before I 'retired' I was a dietitian ;) ). I cried after I got off the phone with her because for some reason it seemed so scary. I didn't really understand. B and I don't have any food allergies. I nursed her exclusively forever! I waited until she was well over a year old to introduce PB into her diet. Just a week or two prior to this I'd had a conversation with a neighbor mom who told me how annoying it was that they had such strict rules at her kids school regarding peanut butter. How they excluded HER kid when he brought a PB&J, not the kids that were allergic. I had agreed with her, "That IS silly! Why your kid? He's not the one with the allergy!" Some flawed logic here...
So, then we begin to learn the long list of things A can't eat. The obvious: peanuts, peanut butter, candy with peanuts/peanut butter. The not so obvious: Chick-Fil-A, Kashi products, lots of "fancy" restaurants fry in peanut oil...the list goes on. It's been almost two years since her diagnosis and I still get nervous. I remind everyone- at least twice before they take her anywhere. Her preschool teacher is my sister who is a hyper-vigilant as me and I still worry..."What if she takes a bite of _____'s PB sandwich while Rachael isn't looking?"
She has had two run-in's with the scoundrel, the most recently at Easter which B & I joking refer to as the Peanut Butter Trinity incident (A terrible pun I realize)- she wiped her face on a peanut butter laden towel, may or may not have taken a bite of a PB sandwich, and most definitely smeared her hands through some PB left on the counter. We caught it quickly and were able to get it under control with a man-sized dose of Benadryl. Why was she around all this peanut butter you ask? Because it's hard to tell people who eat it/love it to get rid of it for her... You get puzzled looks when you start rearranging your friends/parents pantry to move the PB up out of her reach. So, this has been my struggle for the last two years. I wonder, Will this be harder when she's older? When she gets invited to a party at Chick-Fil-A, but can't eat there? Will she try something at school someone's mom made not thinking?
She can recite to me now the rules when she is away from me: 1. Be sweet 2. Listen to ______. 3. NO peanut butter. And I know, I know it could be worse, but still in it's own right it's scary.
And I'm slowly learning to take small leaps of faith, jumping off two feet, and trusting. Trusting my child will remember the rules, and everyone remembers her neurotic mama is at home worrying if I remembered to tell them no Cheeburger Cheeburger.
I know you are all wondering? Jumping off two feet? What's that about? Well, at above mentioned well-child visit our pediatrician was going over some milestones: physical, verbal, etc. One of those was "Child will be able to jump off two feet", I got a little hung up on that one. All day long thinking, "Geez, that's really high in the air!" I walked around our house gauging the height of different surfaces to see. When Blake came home for dinner I told him about the milestone, he AGREED with me that was really high, and an odd milestone. So we both scratched our heads and went on. Several days later, Blake finds the handout about the milestones. I see what he has in his hands and I'm waiting for him to finish reading it so we can both shake our heads that AK will surely not be reaching this milestone anytime soon, but instead he burst into that famous Blake cackle. "Jess, jumping off two feet" and he jump in the air- off two feet....Sigh. Fail, Me. Fail. And periodically B or my father-in-law reminds me that two feet is awful high in the air...
