Get Your Freak On!

"Not to freak you out or anything, Mom...." 

And this is how my son started our conversation on Sunday. 

Fortunately, it was Skype, so I could see him. He looked great!  He looked just like he should!  So,  I swallowed hard and let him continue without me trying to reach through the computer and grab his butt back here from college.

Robert, who has a life threatening food allergy to milk, tells me that he almost made a terrible mistake.  KEY WORD being "almost".  Whew. 

He was in one of the many food service lines in one of the many dining halls on campus and chose a drink to go with the lunch the chef specially made for him.  He took it from the soda cooler and decided it looked like a drink he would enjoy.  He never thought it could possibly contain milk.  After all, it was in with the Coke products.  However, as he went to pay for it, he decided he should check the ingredients and was incredibly surprised to see that this "cola" like fruit juice contained skim milk.  My college kid was surprised, and I am sure relieved, that he took a second to turn over the bottle and read the ingredients before he took a sip and ended up having to self administer Epinephrine and spend a few hours at the hospital.

Seems as though milk is creeping into many new things lately.

Here is the drink he picked....owned by the Coca Cola company...it's called Fuze.

I also noticed a new Gatorade that has milk protein in it:  Gatorade G-3

G-wiz!  Give me (and a million other mom's with kids who have food allergies) a break!

Hard Habit to Break

 "Did you read the gredients?", spoken by a little voice from a four year old boy that looked more like he was only two.  Those were the words my son Robert used to say every time someone would hand his something new to eat.  Those were the words a boy who was diagnosed at 8 months of age with life threatening food allergies to milk, egg and peanut would use to remind the grown-ups in his life to read the label and keep him safe.

I read the ingredients the other day when I shopped for bread but I didn't have to.  That little boy is now 18 years old and has moved 400 miles away to college.  It doesn't matter what the ingredients are in the bread. He won't be home until Thanksgiving and the bread will be long consumed by my other three children.

I wonder if I will ever stop turning over a package and reading the ingredients. I wonder if I will ever not realize when I just cross contaminated a knife or a cutting board.   I think, after 18 years of doing everything I could do to keep this child safe, that these habits will be hard to break.