This Week Has Been Nuts

The kids and I went to visit my parents this past week;  it was quite an exciting visit.  I won’t write about how my mom tried to kill them for the second time in four months with nut-riddled food, because that might embarrass her.  I’ll just post this picture of her chasing Rhys with a bat instead.

This is how I was disciplined too. Sadly, I am not a good sprinter. (kidding on the first part)

It was an honest mistake and it wasn’t actually nuts, but almond extract and a tiny, tiny amount at that.  I don’t even know if they’re allergic to almonds – we’ve never had them tested for that particular nut.  Just because a kid is allergic to peanuts doesn’t necessarily mean they’re allergic to all nuts (they’re not allergic to me…).  As soon as we realized they’d both been exposed I doped them up with benadryl and watched them like a hawk for the next two hours.  They were fine, I probably needed a nitroglycerine tablet as I think I now have angina.

Two days later, poor Rhys ended up in the urgent care.  He’d been playing with Henry and his cousin outside at my aunt’s house and started wheezing.  He couldn’t even talk without having trouble catching his breath.  So I freaked out.  Again.  And of course I’d forgotten his nebulizer AND his inhaler at home, three hours away.  I called his pediatrician and they called in albuterol to a drug store in my folks’ town, but they didn’t have a spacer or mask, which kids need to get the medicine in them, or at least Rhys does.  So it was pretty much useless (though we figured something out, more on that later).  The pediatrician talked to him on the phone and said from listening to him he definitely needed to go to urgent care too, so off we went.  He got a nebulizer treatment and was given the all-clear.  Not two hours later, he was back to wheezing.  I called the on-call nurse at his pediatrician’s office and we followed her directions to take a shower for 20 minutes and then do 2 albuterol treatments.  Luckily, my dad had a leftover spacer from his albuterol days, so we rigged it up and Rhys took a hit off the albuterol peace pipe.  I enjoy a nice, long, hot shower, but not  as much when I’m accompanied by a 3-year-old who is short enough that eye-level hits at a very awkward spot.  And did I mention that my parents’ shower is small, like a phone booth?  So let’s just go ahead and triple the awkward.

After the shower and the treatments he was okay and hasn’t wheezed again but we now know he can’t handle playing outside in pollen (the urgent care doctor said it was very bad this week) and possibly under nut trees.  I did freak out internally a little when they said it was a walnut tree.  It’s not like the tree was going to grab him and force it’s limb down his throat, but after the first incident, I was a little nut-jumpier than usual.

Oh and I wolfed down dinner so fast that when we got back to my parents’ house, it all came back up.  More fun!

Sarah didn’t sleep through the night until our last night there.  She woke up at 4 am again this morning, I guess I better get to sewing on those housecoats.