So last week was Halloween. When I was little, I enjoyed trick-or-treating along with the rest of the kids in my neighborhood and school. I had a costume every year (although it wasn't anything elaborate like what we have nowadays), and I went out with my friends and went door to door in our neighborhoods. It was a careless time, and I didn't really think about it more than an excuse to get a lot of candy.
When our church started to put on alternative candy-centered events on the last day of October, I wasn't sure what to think of it. When I was in college it seemed like just another thing that would take my free time away. Of course who knows what else I'd be doing instead of that. Trick or treating? Hah! But it did get me to start thinking about the meaning of the holiday, and whether or not I wanted to encourage participation in it.
When we had kids, I wasn't quite sure what to make of the holiday either. We got costumes for the girls and took them around the neighborhood, but mostly just to show off how cute they were, especially in their costumes. Whether or not we got candy I could have cared less. Actually I think I would have preferred that the girls didn't get candy at all.
When Elizabeth got diagnosed with her tree nut allergy, it really changed candy and chocolate in our house. Suddenly I had to be careful with everything that she was about to eat. It got to be way too much to handle the first few years of elementary school, reading all the labels, looking up the candy manufacturers' websites, and calling them up and finding out whether or not the candy was made in what we call a "nutty facility."
So last year, we decided to go candy shopping and just do away with the whole Halloween idea. Sure, it's hard to get away from it because the elementary schools really seem to relish pushing the holiday on the kids. Many of the kindergarten homework assignments during the month of October involve costumes, jack-o-lanterns, etc. There's also a costume parade on the morning of the 31st, when all the kids, K thru 8, march around the school wearing their costumes.
But we were able to pull it off not only last year, but also this year.
Last year, we left for Hawaii on my mom's birthday, November 6. We decided to take my parents out for dinner to celebrate her birthday the week before, which happens to be October 31, which also happened to fall on a weekend. So we vacated the house, took my parents out to dinner, and then went to Target to buy candy for the kids. I told them to pick out whatever they wanted, and so they each picked a two-pack of ring pops and were so excited about how they could get whatever candy they wanted. We took it back to my parents' house, and I let the girls gorge on as much ring pops and M&Ms (courtesy of my parents) as they wanted that night. No complaints from anybody.
This year we didn't have to take my parents out on Halloween (we ended up doing it the day before her birthday this year), but we did end up running an errand right before dinner right next to one of our favorite Japanese restaurants. So we had sushi for dinner, and then went to Target to pick out candy, and then ToysRUs to use up a couple of gift cards the girls had received for their birthdays earlier this year. The girls picked out sugar free gum. No complaints from anybody again.
I think we've got a successful tradition going on. I've decided I've got a disdain for cheap candy, commercialized costumes and goblins and stuff. The girls told everyone what a fun evening they had the next day and I don’t think they felt deprived. We didnt have to deal with any candy we don’t like, and better yet, we don’t have to deal with any allergens.
Showing posts with label nut allergy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label nut allergy. Show all posts
Tuesday, November 8, 2011
Sunday, May 10, 2009
Nut allergy
Elizabeth was diagnosed with a nut allergy last year. For the most part it doesn't really affect our day-to-day lives since I'm not a huge nut fan, although I do appreciate a good candy-covered nut once in a while. But it's not something that I insist on eating, and frankly I could go my entire life without tasting a nut and I'll be fine with that.
Elizabeth hasn't had an anaphylactic reaction where her throat closes shut and she stops breathing, but she has broken out in hives and complained about her mouth hurting. The allergist has told us to keep an EpiPen around at all times, just for that reason. It's a prescription that hopefully we'll never ever have to use, but it's there, for that slim chance that we might need it.
I'm generally good about checking for nuts when I give food to Elizabeth, and she's generally good about reading the ingredient list as well. And if something has nuts in it, she knows to avoid it, even if it's a tempting treat that everybody else is happily munching on.
Recently I realized that Indian food (one of my husband's favorites) commonly contains nuts, so we're very careful to ask about everything that we order when we go out to eat.
And on Friday we had a potluck lunch at the girls' preschool, and once again, we were careful to ask about the common offenders. Thankfully the suspect items (a banana muffin and an Indian dish) were homemade, so the parents were able to say that the food that they brought didn't have nuts in them, and I was able to give the girls a taste of each.
Unfortunately there was an offender that I didn't know about until after Elizabeth ate it all up. It was a sandwich. The bread was a sweet Hawaiian roll (nut-free), and the filling looked like it was a tuna or chicken salad (apparently nut-free, at least in all of my previous sandwich-eating experience). I'm not a sandwich-type of person, especially for potlucks, but I know the girls will eat them, so I put one on each of their plates.
Elizabeth ate all of hers up, along with everything else on her plate, and she said her tongue tickled. I asked her if it felt like an allergic reaction and she said it didn't, so I just let it go. And then Abigail ate about 2/3 of everything on her plate, so I finished off her food, including half her sandwich. (Yeah, that's how I get my seconds at buffets now.) A few bites into the sandwich I realized there's some texture in there that's a little different from your typical sandwich filling, so I took a closer look and realized that there are chopped almonds in there.
Folks, I just fed my nut-allergic daughter a chopped almond sandwich.
Thankfully her only reaction was the tickly tongue, but it could easily have become a much more dire situation. I don't know much about allergic reactions other than what the allergist and a few allergic-children's-parent-friends have told me, but I have been told that a reaction to nuts that involves the face or mouth can easily become a reaction that involves the airway closing shut.
And that scares the crap out of me.
Elizabeth hasn't had an anaphylactic reaction where her throat closes shut and she stops breathing, but she has broken out in hives and complained about her mouth hurting. The allergist has told us to keep an EpiPen around at all times, just for that reason. It's a prescription that hopefully we'll never ever have to use, but it's there, for that slim chance that we might need it.
I'm generally good about checking for nuts when I give food to Elizabeth, and she's generally good about reading the ingredient list as well. And if something has nuts in it, she knows to avoid it, even if it's a tempting treat that everybody else is happily munching on.
Recently I realized that Indian food (one of my husband's favorites) commonly contains nuts, so we're very careful to ask about everything that we order when we go out to eat.
And on Friday we had a potluck lunch at the girls' preschool, and once again, we were careful to ask about the common offenders. Thankfully the suspect items (a banana muffin and an Indian dish) were homemade, so the parents were able to say that the food that they brought didn't have nuts in them, and I was able to give the girls a taste of each.
Unfortunately there was an offender that I didn't know about until after Elizabeth ate it all up. It was a sandwich. The bread was a sweet Hawaiian roll (nut-free), and the filling looked like it was a tuna or chicken salad (apparently nut-free, at least in all of my previous sandwich-eating experience). I'm not a sandwich-type of person, especially for potlucks, but I know the girls will eat them, so I put one on each of their plates.
Elizabeth ate all of hers up, along with everything else on her plate, and she said her tongue tickled. I asked her if it felt like an allergic reaction and she said it didn't, so I just let it go. And then Abigail ate about 2/3 of everything on her plate, so I finished off her food, including half her sandwich. (Yeah, that's how I get my seconds at buffets now.) A few bites into the sandwich I realized there's some texture in there that's a little different from your typical sandwich filling, so I took a closer look and realized that there are chopped almonds in there.
Folks, I just fed my nut-allergic daughter a chopped almond sandwich.
Thankfully her only reaction was the tickly tongue, but it could easily have become a much more dire situation. I don't know much about allergic reactions other than what the allergist and a few allergic-children's-parent-friends have told me, but I have been told that a reaction to nuts that involves the face or mouth can easily become a reaction that involves the airway closing shut.
And that scares the crap out of me.
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