No more PB&J

Last Friday I wanted to switch up Grant's usual lunch of cheese toast, veggies and fruit and thought a nice peanut butter and jelly sandwich sounded easy and somewhat healthy. Plus, he's now 12 months so that means he can try peanut butter, right? So I make him up a little sandwich and he eats it, not very excitedly, but he gets it down. In the back of my head I am thinking that I hope he isn't allergic to it, but he hasn't had trouble with any other food, so I tell myself he's fine. Right after I take him out of him chair I notice little red bumps forming under his chin. He won't hold still for me to take a good look at him so I bring him over to the TV and turn on Signing Time b/c I know he will be looking in one direction for awhile. In that time, the bumps had progressed to hives and started spreading all over his face. I'm getting quite concerned at this point, so I call the doctors office to see if I should bring him in or what I can do (yes, nursing knowledge pretty much goes out the window when your own child is the one who is sick). When I call the office all I get in their message machine saying we're closed for the next hour for lunch. Who takes an hour for lunch!!!! Fortunately, I had the UNC help line # from a previous late night call when Grant was 3 months old and had croup. At this point the hives are puffy all over his face and neck and he's rubbing at them, however, he seemed to be breathing normally. I finally get a hold of the nurse, who says just to give him some baby benadryl and watch him to make sure he doesn't have any breathing difficulties and call my doctor when they re-open. Of course I don't have any benadryl on hand but luckily my friend Lizzy who lives downstairs had some to share. The nurse said I needed to watch him for 2 hours because he could develop respiratory distress during that time in which cause he'd need to get to the ER immediately. So I'm pretty freaked by this whole experience but my blood pressure slowly begins to decrease back to normal once his hives start clearing out, about an hour after they started, thank goodness!! We went to the doctors yesterday for Grant to get some blood drawn which they will test to see how allergic he is. In the mean time, no more nuts in any form for Grant and we get to carry around an Epinephren pen wherever we go in case he has another encounter with peanuts that progresses to a worse reaction (which they say may be the case). I'm just glad that didn't happen the first time and it was just hives, that was scary enough for me!