peanut allergy

Joy in kid world. And freaking out your sister. Yes, my poor son is one of those food allergy kids. I shared about his jarring introduction to allergic reactions a long while ago, and now that he’s three we recently had a food challenge in ye ole doctor’s office. That’s when you starve your child until you reach the doctor’s office and then slowly feed him a food he’s previously reacted to and wait & watch as you incrementally increase the amount of the potentially death-inducing food. For four hours. With a three year old. In a small examination room. It’s a peach. A little background for those not willing to delve into the depth of my hyperlinking (I don’t blame you–so often my older posts had bad photos, and link to the old blog so everything’s a big ? over there): SuperBoy was allergic to peanut, egg, and reacted to pine nut. Blood tests confirmed all this, as did a lovely trip to ER when he was 18 months old and ate peanut for the first time. Charmed, I’m sure. IGG versus IGE testing is whole other blog post, but he appears to be sensitive to a variety of foods as well. A few great resources: Food Allergy Support Group of MN, It’s an Itchy Little World, and my girlfriend Abby’s blog about her son’s allergies. The egg part, well, egg is molecularly different when it’s baked into (not onto) other foods–the chemistry changes. So baked eggs weren’t off…