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.

Happy birthday, honey!

Today is my husband's birthday. Won't tell you how old he's turning today though.

I'm picking him up from work in Tracy, about 25 minutes to the east of us. And then we're going up north another 30 minutes to Stockton to eat dinner at The Old Spaghetti Factory (haven't been in years!) and then drop off the kids with my grandparents. And then after that, who knows what we'll do. I know, it sounds like so much fun. Probably we'll end up going to Borders, sip coffee, and read magazines across the table from each other while not saying a single word to each other, close the place down, and then see a movie. Maybe. What an adventure, huh?

Not that I celebrate it or anything, but...

Happy Earth Day.

May your environment be... uhh... Earth.

sickie in the house

On Saturday morning Abi played normally after eating a normal breakfast of cereal and milk, but right before lunch she suddenly complained of a stomachache. She'd complained of stomachache in the past and sometimes it turned out to be because of diarrhea, but many times it turned out to be nothing, just a call for attention. Anyway, her stomachache on Saturday quickly turned into vomiting. After her nap she said she was hungry, so I gave her yogurt, which she promptly vomited back after ravenously snarfing it down. She ended up throwing up 4 times on Saturday. I tried to limit her intake for the rest of that day, basically giving her popsicles and apple juice.

At the end of the day, though, she kept saying she was hungry, so I gave her a few bites of plain watered-down rice. She kept it down okay, and was fine all day Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday, playing, eating and pooping normally.

I had had a pretty unpleasant case of stomachache/vomiting/diarrhea the week before, beginning Saturday and ending on Tuesday, so I thought she had what I had, until I saw that she was fine and didn’t even have loose stools.

Fast forward to today. She had a normal breakfast of yogurt, half-bagel, and cream cheese, and a sippy of milk. After breakfast, however, she lay on the floor, which is totally not normal of her. She’s usually busy playing and running around. Anyways, she said her tummy hurt (sometimes she’ll say that right before she goes poop), so she went to the bathroom, but only peed – she said her poop wouldn’t come out. I don’t think she’s constipated though – she had a normal poop yesterday, and she’s never been constipated, even as a baby. She then went back to lying down, took a five-minute catnap, and then woke up saying her stomach hurt again. I asked if she needed to throw up, and she said she did. This turned out to be about a three-second warning – she ended up barfing her whole breakfast again, all over her clothes, her hair, and the living room carpet.

So off to the shower we go, and now that she's all cleaned up and I finally got the carpet de-nastified, she's playing like normal and claiming she's hungry.

Color Abi sick :-( , color me confused :-/.

the Mommy Voice

Like most mommies, I've developed that Mommy Voice. You know the kind: the one that says "I mean business, and you better obey me or else the toys will revolt and all run away in separate directions in a blink of an eye."

Well, today I was folding socks and underwear with the girls, and Elizabeth, in true form, tried to sneak away to play in the middle of matching socks. Many times. Finally, I said in my sternest Mommy Voice: "Elizabeth, you come right back here and finish your folding." (Don't worry, I just make her do her own while I do the rest of the family's. I try to get Abigail to do her share, but her attention span is about the size of a gnat.) Thankfully the Mommy Voice worked, since really, it's hard to look authoritative while holding up a pair of undies.

Do you have smelly foods from your childhood?

Whether it's kimchi or gefilte fish or some kind of curry, we all have food that smells up our childhoods.

-- Amy Sue Nathan

I found this quote today and it reminded me of a time when my parents would brew han-yak in the garage. Basically it's this nasty concoction of all kinds of herbs and strange things, darker and smellier than burnt coffee, but supposed to be oh-so-good for you.

A quick Korean lesson: "Han" = Korean. "Yak" = Medicine.

So han-yak is, quite literally, Korean medicine.

And whenever somebody in the house got sick or injured or something, and medicines from the drugstore didn't cut it, out came the han-yak. And then the whole house would smell (even when it's brewing in the garage!) for weeks and weeks (at least it seemed like it at the time).

And I really have no idea who Amy Sue Nathan is. Hopefully she's somebody I'd like to have coffee with, not That Embarrassing Friend whose calls I have to screen via caller ID.

wild things just running around all over the place

so we're getting on the freeway this morning on the way to preschool, and we see this huge field of yellow wildflowers growing on a grassy hill. eliz asks me what kind of flowers they are, and i really don't know, so i say "maybe they're wildflowers," figuring that's good enough of an answer.

eliz: wildflowers?
me: yes.
eliz: do they run around?