The one that I would like to talk about is his allergic reaction when he was a little over a year old, which involved peanut butter.
We had given him peanut butter in small amounts probably starting at eight or nine months. He did not have any kind of reaction to it so we thought that everything was good.
One morning I was feeding our son peanut butter on toast after my husband went to work. After a few bites he started to itch his eyes a lot. His eyes were getting very watery and he was getting red spots on his face and chest. I rushed him to the upstairs bathroom and took off his clothes as I believed him to be having an allergic reaction. I put him in the tub and started washing off the peanut butter that was left on his body. He was breathing fine and acting pretty normal. He just looked miserable from all the scratching.
Once I got all of the peanut butter off of him, it took maybe ten to fifteen minutes for his itching to calm down and he was back to his regular happy self. We talked to our family doctor about it. She was going to have him do an allergy test, but then covid happened and medical tests that weren’t as urgent were postponed. The more that we talked with people the more we just didn’t want our baby to have to go through the allergy test. It sounded painful with all the pokes that he would have to endure. We made a decision to avoid all kinds of nuts in our house. We were introduced to Wow Butter, which is a substitute for peanut butter and it is crazy how similar it smells and tastes like peanut butter.
However, this experience has scared me from trying any nuts with my other two kids for fear of having to deal with another allergic reaction. Thankfully it was not an extreme one where he went into anaphylaxis shock, but it was a reaction that could have been worse and so we take precautions and avoid all kinds of nuts.
