Both of my kids have aliases related to peanut butter. It's ironic because we did this before we ever knew that they might never be able to taste it. My son is Jif he's 2 1/2 years old and my daughter is Reese and she is 7 months.
This is Jif after he had eggs one time, my camera's just the one on my phone but you can see the hives around the lips and on the arm.
Jif was always a healthy baby until he turned 4 months old and we introduced solid food into his diet. He was exclusively breastfed until then. Our pediatrician encouraged us to start feeding him rice cereal at 4 months old because at 4 months old he weighed almost 20 ibs and the pediatrician thought it would be a good idea for him to be able to get the calories he needed through solid food. After about 2 feedings of rice cereal I noticed a rash all over Jif's body, it was eczema. At first I thought it was from laundry detergent but it ended being caused by the rice. When we gave him rice he broke out in a rash, when we took it away his skin was fine. The doctor said that Jif was the second person he had ever heard of who was allergic to rice. We slowly introduced other foods and Jif was always sick. He got a lot of cold/flu type things but he also vomited once or twice a week. At his one year appointment I told the pediatrician about this and she ran an allergy blood test. It came back showing that Jif was very allergic to peanuts and wheat, moderately allergic to soy and eggs, and slightly allergic to milk. THe pediatrician said that he wouldn't be able to have anything with peanuts, wheat, eggs, soy or milk for 6 months. This was pretty hard for me to hear and worried me a lot. Especially in taking whole milk out of his diet. How was he going to get the calories that he needed? And I was worried about him getting good nutrition with such a limited diet. I decided to go and see an allergist to get a second opinion. Meanwhile I went back to breastfeeding even though I had weaned him weeks earlier and by some miracle my milk came back and I was able to not make him drink soy or other types of milk. The allergist tested him with skin tests to verify his allergies. It turns out that the blood test gives too many false positives, but the skin test gives too many false negatives. So if you get a positive on both, you know it is fairly likely that there is indeed a food allergy. Through the skin test and gradually phasing foods back into the diet we determined that Jif probably wasn't allergic to wheat, milk, or soy. During the time that I took all of this out of his diet his vomiting had stopped so I slowly brought each ingredient back in. Wheat was fine, no reaction. Milk was fine, no reaction (thank goodness-those two ingredients were the hardest to avoid in my opinion) and then we brought soy back which was tricky. Things like soy lethicin didn't seem to bother him, but soy protein would cause vomiting, and to this day I am still not sure if he is allergic to soybean oil. Sometimes he will eat something and the only ingredient I can find that might be a culprit is the soybean oil, and other foods he never has a problem with when they contain soybean oil. Well sadly it took me a few months to really figure out that soy was not ok for him to eat and that was making him sick, but once I finally took soy out he stopped vomiting on a weekly basis. We have had a few bad reactions with a few foods. The first bad reaction was with peanuts. Jif was being babysat by my in laws and husband and one of his uncles accidentally gave him a bite of peanut butter cookie because he didn't realize he was allergic to peanuts. We didn't realize we hadn't told the uncle because it felt to us like we had told everyone. My husband in the other room started to hear him cough and thought to himself, that's weird, he's not sick. Then it hit him that there were peanut butter cookies in the house and he might have gotten one. It didn't take him too long to realize that that was what had happened. Then Jif started vomiting and having hives. Unfortunately this was the one time that I had taken Jif's emergency epi pen with me instead of leaving it with the babysitters and I was at a spa getting a massage and not accessible. My husband and inlaws took him to the pharmacy and bought him some benedryl and gave it to him. Since it was his first episode and not really severe, that actually worked for him. What should have been done was Jif should have been stuck with the epi pen and taken to the hospital, but thank goodness the benedryl worked. The second really bad reaction happened with eggs. Jif is allergic to the egg white and the allergy is worse when the egg is uncooked. Most times when he eats something with egg in it he vomits with hives. We have never had breathing issues when he eats eggs. One time I was letting Jif help me make cookies and he decided to stick his head into the bowl of cookie dough. My first thought was "Oh, no raw eggs he could get salmonella" and then suddenly I realized it was much worse than that. Within a minute he had hives everywhere, from the top of his head to the bottom of his feet, his eyes and lips started swelling up and he began to vomit. I quickly gave him benedryl and that seemed to stop it, but that was a close one. I called my husband to come home in case we had to take him to the hospital. So my Jif is allergic to the following things in order of severity: Peanuts, Eggs, Soy, Rice, andTomatoes (give him swelling around the lips). I actually let him have tomatoes since it seems to be a mild skin reaction that doesn't bother him much.
