When I was pregnant, the thing I ate the most was peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. I didn't think of it as a craving at the time. It just sounded good. Plus, it provided servings of several of the food groups. When Lillia was born, I joked that she was made of the stuff and eventually, I started calling her "Peanut berry."

Which is ironic because the first time I gave her peanut butter, she spit it out and said "No like it peanut butter." So I didn't feed it to her for a while. A few months later, I gave it another try. This time, it seemed like she was okay with it at first. But then she started trying to scrape it off her tongue, whined, and said again: "No like it peanut butter." I was starting to believe her. But something about the way she tried to remove the food from her mouth, the way she had seemed to enjoy it for a few seconds, and her delayed reaction made me think there was something else going on there. Like, it wasn't that she didn't like it, it was more like...she was UNCOMFORTABLE with it. I quickly tried to brush the thought aside, and convinced myself that she probably just didn't enjoy the texture.

But a few weeks later, I gave her a peanut. One little, tiny peanut that she happily chewed about three times before she got that same panicked look on her face, spit the nut out, and then coughed till she threw up.

FUCKING. PEANUT. ALLERGY.

I haven't had this diagnosis confirmed yet. I didn't think it was so bad - I mean, minor peanut allergies do exist, and she hadn't gone into anaphylactic shock yet. But then, one day last week, the babysitter tells me that Lillia managed to get a hold of a bag of peanuts that had been sitting on the counter. She shoved one in her mouth before there was time to stop her, but then immediately spit it out as she had done in the past. A few minutes later, the babysitter said, Lillia had hives all around her lip. Which is bad. Not minor. And peanut allergies get worse, or so I've heard.  

So, I need to make an appointment with the pediatrician. In the meantime, my babysitter has had to de-peanut her house. I'm pissed off at the world for whatever has happened to this planet that is making allergies and asthma more prevalent, that is making it so that a child with NO family history of food allergies - I mean ZERO - whose mother ate better than I have in my whole life while I was trying to be, and then was, pregnant, and who was fed only breastmilk and organic foods till she was a year old, gets one of the worst kind of food allergies around. WTF, world?