Life changed in October

Peanuts...I have grown to have great animosity toward this little food.  EVERYTHING we do involves thinking about peanuts!  Gus is my third child and the first two had viral induced asthma and eczema but no food allergies.  I knew this put us at higher risk than other families so I always paid attention when introducing a new food but it always went smoothly.

Gus began to have rashes from basically the beginning of his life.  I breastfed him and tried eliminating different foods.  We also eliminated all fragrances in our laundry, lotions, persons because we thought that was a factor.  We never got to the bottom of it but seemed to reduce his rashes.  Last fall, when Gus was 18 months, I gave him his first bit of peanut butter.  I spread a little on a piece of bread.  After I gave it to him in his high chair, he immediately began to rub his eyes and act agitated.  Within 30 seconds, he was red on his face and I tried to clean it off thinking it was a skin irritation.  Hives appeared and he was throat clearing.  I knew he was in trouble so Lily and I ran to the car with him to go to the hospital (all within about 90 seconds of receiving the food).  At a light about a mile from our house (as I was on the phone with our doctor's office but not any medical staff as they weren't 'in" on Wednesdays-we switched doctor's offices shortly after), I got out to check on him and his face was unrecognizeable so covered with hives and swollen.  He was also very very silent-had quit making the throat clearing noise/coughing and was struggling to breathe. I called 911 and pulled over.  By the time the ambulance got there, he had peaked and his reaction was on his way down.  Even though he was 100x better by the time his dad met us at a doctor's, his dad was shocked by his appearance-still quite swollen hours later.  When we were back home that evening, I cleaned up the lunch and discovered Gus had only consumed one little baby tooth mark of food even though he had started lunch starving at 1 pm.  I believe he began to react before he even consumed it as it was so unusual for him to not attack his food after a long morning nap.  After later allergy testing, a peanut allergy was confirmed and we were told to expect that first reaction to be his best. I was bound and determined that this would be something we would tackle and still live very full lives of travel and dining out.  This has turned out to be a very difficult resolution to fulfill.  Despite our best efforts, Gus has gone on to have 6 more reactions in 7 months.

Navigating

As we are preparing for another trip and I am scouring the Internet for peanut allergy friendly dining in Chicago and St. Louis and coming up empty, I decided maybe there are some Iowa folks who want to know what we've learned! So I hope over the next few weeks to get this up to date on our journey so far and then post what we learn. Which seems to be, out of necessity! Something ALL the time.