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17 Weird Things Allergy Parents Consider Totally Normal By Pam Moore
Before we found out our younger child had severe, life-threatening food allergies, we kept the kids’ emergency information on a crumpled piece of paper, shoved in a drawer between the vegetable peeler and the wine opener.
2. When the gluten-free, casein-free, dairy-free, soy-free chicken nuggets are on sale you buy 10 packages.
But when our daughter was 8 months old, we went to the allergist, hoping to figure out why she was chronically congested and why nothing we tried could touch her eczema. Going into the appointment, I was hopeful. Leaving the appointment, I was deflated. We learned our baby was allergic to eggs, peanuts, tree nuts, dairy, and wheat. We had strict instructions to keep the EpiPen with her at all times, to avoid letting someone who had so much as eaten a peanut kiss her, and to schedule a follow-up appointment.
4. You read food labels compulsively. You know all the 18-syllable words that dairy, wheat, nuts, and eggs hide in.
In the weeks following the diagnosis, I cried overwhelmed tears whenever I thought about it. Could I protect my baby from the danger of a rogue cashew? Would I be able to trust anyone else to keep her safe? Would she miss the chance to be a normal kid? Fear consumed me. It has been a year since we got the diagnosis and I still worry. I plan ahead for everything when food is involved. But just as friends and family assured me it would, living with allergies has become our new normal. If any of the below feel normal to you, welcome to the world of parenting an allergic kid, where a random piece of food at the playground is just as scary as a rattlesnake sighting. 1. You don’t think twice about telling anyone, whether it’s a babysitter, a friend, or an overly friendly grandma-type in line at the bank, “Don’t feed my kid.” You’d hang a “Do Not Feed Me” sign around her neck, like they have at the zoo if it were socially acceptable. 22
Our Kids Magazine | May/June 2021
3. Your kids’ baby doll is prone to bouts of “anaphylactic.”
5. You think nothing of digging through the trash to retrieve food packaging at a friend’s house in order to see the ingredient list. 6. Your toddler brags to babysitters that she knows how to work the EpiPen. And though you’ve never verified whether or not this is actually true, she’s seen you show enough sitters how to do it that you’re pretty sure it is. 7. When you arrive at any park/library/indoor play area/ friend’s living room, you scan the floor for potential allergens. You do it again whenever a new child arrives. You do it again even if no one new has arrived, just to be on the safe side. You know people probably assume you’re a helicopter parent. You are too busy looking for rogue peanuts to care, though. 8. When you are invited to a social gathering, you consider a number of factors including: the time of the event, your relationship with the host, how long you plan to stay, whether or not young children will be eating (and dropping) allergens, and the host’s personal experience with allergies. You use this matrix to determine whether 1) you will attend, 2) you will interrogate the host about the menu in advance, 3) you will casually inquire about the menu when you arrive, or 4) just bring your own safe meal—although you know you will bring your own food in the end, regardless. FRIEND US @ facebook.com/OurKidsMagazine210
