Oh the stories I could tell about my 13 weeks of parenthood. We are excited that our little guy is sleeping for 7 hours at night, and supporting his head on his own. My husband and I now play rock, paper, scissors to see who has to change the dirty diapers (which I still haven’t won), and we love to show off that he babbles incoherently and smiles. Funny how small things can be so big when talking about infants.

One big worry I have is if he will have food allergies or not. The information I’ve read has been a bit vague and contradictory; eat all foods, stay away from the common allergy foods, if you suspect an allergy, contact your pediatrician. So I asked some friends to share their experiences from when they first learned their child has food allergies.

Ours was by complete surprise. Ana was 19 months old and I was getting a late night snack of a pb&j sandwich which I craved and ate daily while pregnant with her. She took one small bite for the first time and had a anaphylactic reaction within 5 seconds. Really scary. After that we had her tested for the rest.

Well we have 2 one was the egg allergy which he has now outgrown that was hives and breathing trouble from a finger lick of icing when he was 8 months old.
The nut was complete shock. He had fallen at the park and I took him to my mom’s to check him because she was a nurse she gave him a macadamia nut cookie to quiet him down. He instantly started throwing up, mom said to take him to dr because he had a concussion. The dr was less than 5 minutes from her house and by time we got there he was unconscious with whelps head to toe and barely breathing. I will never forget pulling his limp body out of his car seat and running into the office.

When Cooper was 10 months old, we gave him his first scrambled egg. He immediately broke out into hives so we suspected food allergies may be an issue. The pediatrician advised us to not give him any peanuts until he was 3 years old. Unfortunately, we didn’t know much about cross contamination at that time and reading labels was much harder than it is now. When Cooper was 2 1/2 yrs old, we were at a party where they were "crunching round PB&J sandwiches" for the kids. We asked for just jelly for him and it never occurred to me that the cutter was contaminated until he took 1 bite and broke out into hives immediately all over his body. He then started to say "I can't get the jelly off my tongue" and I knew something bad was happening. I called the pediatrician to let them know I was on my way because I didn’t think an ambulance would get to us in time. The poor baby vomited the whole way there and by the time we got to the doctor’s office he was in full blown anaphylactic shock. Thankfully, the doctor and nurses were waiting in the parking lot with an Epi-Pen and got to him in time. That is the last time he went anywhere without his epi-pens and now thanks to the addition of a detection dog to our family we hope to never use one again.

Scary to read and think about possibly going through, but at least they give other new parents some real life examples should something like this ever happen to their child.  

-Katy