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October 16, 2006

Trust Your Instincts

Instinct seems to be what drives our decisions these days when it comes to managing our children's food allergies. If we are presented with a social opportunity, we can pretty quickly gauge the difficulty of providing a safe situation for our daughters. If we are out for dinner and our requests are met with hesitation and the manager or chef isn't available, we simply won't take the risk, we'll walk.

Why is this? Well, simply stated, 9 years experience of keeping our girls safe has honed our intuition when it comes to managing child food allergies. And by safe we don't mean sheltered.

Our kids travel on planes across country on an annual basis. We camp with a large group (with shared meals) 6-8 times per year. School field trips are part of the routine (yes, they attend public schools). We go to sporting events (the Globe Trotters are still entertaining) and the girls play on soccer teams.

I don't list these things to brag (although I'm always glad to talk about my kids), I list them for those newly diagnosed families that are feeling frightened about what the future holds for their kids. You can manage this thing and your kids will learn along the way to how to keep themselves safe. And special occassion and events will call for a little extra attention but won't make your child feel excluded - if you just trust your instincts.

Posted by David at October 16, 2006 2:17 PM