"Peanut"....no longer a good choice of nickname.

Making Christmas ornaments on Friday

A better heart-to-heart with Santa on Saturday


Classic grilled cheese face. I'll always remember this moment...just before "the cookie".

I had all sorts of good Joshua stories to share from Friday-Sunday morning of this past weekend. But then Sunday afternoon happened and trumped them all.

Since Joshua has started eating real people food, I've been a bit neurotic (imagine that) about giving him new things to try. I always felt pretty silly about it because he's never had any issues with anything he's eaten. But I've been holding off on peanut butter with this sick feeling in my gut that he would have issues. I know tons of kids his age who enjoy peanut butter and jelly all the time...but I'd never given him any. Until yesterday.

Friday morning, I baked some cookies that had peanut butter in them and I thought that it might be a good way to introduce it to him by letting him have a bite of a cookie. So on Sunday at lunchtime, he asked me for a cookie and I gave him one. As I sat it on his tray, I once again joked to Jason that I was nervous about it, but that we "have to find out sometime". Not funny. Joshua was mostly interested in the M&M's that were in the cookie, so he picked out two of them and ate them. The actual cookie on his M&M's was negligible. Within seconds of putting the second M&M into his mouth he was crying and his face was red, I figured because he was screaming. So we went upstairs to try and settle down and get ready for his nap. But as soon as I got upstairs with him, I noticed that his lips and mouth were all swollen and his face was really splotchy. So I grabbed my shoes and his and downstairs we went.

This is one of those definite moments of panic. We've been through a few scary things that have made me question whether or not we needed to go to the ER, but this was definitely one of those "we have to go" moments. Jason and I didn't talk much about it- we just went. Daddy drove us to the hospital in record time. Within seconds we were out the door, cell phone in one hand calling the pediatrician. (Emily, you were next!) I wasn't happy with the pediatrician's advice to give him some Benadryl and wait to see if it got any worse....you just can't trust a two year old to tell you if they're having trouble breathing. So off to Evan we went.

I'll give them credit at Evan. As soon as they looked at his mouth, we were on to the triage nurse and then right back in the ER with a doctor and nurse waiting for us. They were all geared up to start his IV, but the doctor said that he thought we had time to try giving him the medication orally. Thank goodness. So the nurse came back with his three little cups of medicine (Benadryl, Prednisone and Zantac). I think I rushed it, because after he took the second one, everything came up into our laps---- his whole lunch AND all the medication. They gave us another chance, and that time, we got it all down and kept it down. Phew.

Two green popsicles and 3 hours later, they gave us our walking papers. I guess they were supposed to observe him for 4-6 hours, but realized that he was getting restless and was totally back to normal after 3. Joshua was such a trooper while we were there. He drew pictures for the nurse and the doctor and very proudly handed them to them and said "I made this for you." He kept saying, "The doctor was very very nice to me." He came home in his little yellow hospital gown shirt because of the calamity with the clothes he had on. Even Bear was in the line of fire, but we managed to get him spiffed up when we got home and he's in his arms right now as he sleeps.

I'm not exactly sure what this all means. I suspect we'll begin some allergy testing now (flashing back to my own experience of allergy tests when I was in first grade...where I counted all hundred or so of the skin pricks in German) to see just what we're dealing with. I'm now armed with Benadryl in every travelling bag we have and we're going to have to be extremely careful about no one feeding him anything that we don't know about...especially with holiday parties coming up.

The morals to this story:

1. Don't ignore a mother's (or father's) intuition about something. We really do know what's best for our kids...despite everyone telling you that they know better.

2. Make sure your diaper bag is always packed with enough stuff to occupy your child for 4-6 hours. We ran out after 2 and a half.

3. Keep your little kids the heck away from PEANUTS!