Food Allergy Awareness Week

This is Food Allergy Awareness Week. Unless you have a child with a potentially fatal allergy, you probably don’t know that.
I do. My 8yodd is fatally allergic to dairy. ALL dairy. Just the smallest amount of whey powder in a graham cracker is enough to kill her. This makes our life interesting.

I am posting this today because in the 8 years we have been dealing with this we have come across several different responses to her allergy. It has been hard. Church has been one of the hardest places for my dd to be safe. This world revolves around food. People just don’t understand how serious a food allergy can be. We often have to just take her home instead of going to Sunday school because there will be food in the room. It breaks my heart to see her being excluded from Church because of her allergy. Sometimes I am heartsick at how other adults treat her. Christian adults.

So if you know someone raising a child with a food allergy, do me a favor. Don’t judge. Offer help. Pray. And don’t condemn.

If you work with children and have an allergy child, please find another way to reward your class other than food.

Is it really worth a life to hand out Hershey’s kisses on Valentines Day?

And try not to judge our over protectiveness. It is life and death.

I remember before I had A, reading an article about a school district that outlawed pb & j sandwiches because they had a couple peanut allergy kids in the district. I was incensed! How ridiculous, to make the whole district pay because of one or two kids. Now I get it. I didn’t know how easy it is to get exposed to the offending allergen, I didn’t know how little of the allergen is required to incite a reaction. I didn’t know it was life threatening.

Now I get it.
For more information on food allergy's go here.