Allergic

UGH. It's true. Millie's allergic to peanuts. I finally got myself organized and made an appointment for an allergy test. I wasn't completely organized though: I didn't read the two pages of instructions until the night before the appointment...the instructions which told me that the whole appointment would take about 90 minutes. WHAT?!? Oh no. Simon. I have no childcare plans. He's wild. He's totally freaked out by people in scrubs and lab coats. I'm dead. OK...I'll pretend this is a long plane ride. Pack the entire snack drawer into tiny zip lock bags and charge up the portable DVD.

In the end, both kids were perfectly behaved but the news was not great: she has a fairly severe allergy to peanut butter. Here's a photo of the test in progress:

The top two skin pricks are the control pricks (a histamine and a saline solution); the third mark is a peanut-based essential oil; the bottom is actual peanut butter smeared on her skin. This is the one that reacted quickly and severely.

Thankfully I know how to manage such an allergy so I'm not so much afraid as disappointed. We'll test her again in a year to see if the reaction has diminished at all. And if I get my courage up, we might even start exposing her to small doses to try to help her build a tolerance to it so that she will be less likely to react to minor exposures like peanut dust or peanut oil (This is the type of allergy that I have, and it's what makes it so difficult to manage: I don't always know when there's peanut oil in something and well, I can rarely control what's in the air I breathe).

And a bit of allergy trivia for others out there who may have similar concerns about peanuts: If your child is exposed to peanuts (either accidentally or otherwise), it's recommended that you continue to feed it to them in small doses. Don't hold out on them because you think you need to then wait until they reach a certain age. This makes it more likely that they will build up the antibodies that will later cause the allergy. Just keep on going until and unless you see signs of an adverse reaction. I made this mistake and I'm kicking myself over it now.