Midsummer it's hard to find time to post. We're taking two weeklong family vacations not so far apart and with planning and packing and then getting swamped with work when you get back there's not much time to write.
Two aspects of traveling are relevant to this blog: how to take your eczema pharmacy along with you, and how to handle your kid's food allergies.
Last Saturday we got back from a trip to a family camp in the Sierra Nevada. It was awesome. I didn't think about work for a whole week and was so stress-free that I could jump in the pool whenever I felt like it and strut around in just my bathing suit. You've got to enjoy these times when you have them.
We ate in the camp mess hall. The staff were great about telling us what the ingredients were in all the food. Often they could give us a special dish without nuts or dairy, which are the two things my daughter's allergic to. But of course, she's a picky eater, and you can never tell what she's going to go for.
When we got back, I read about a tragic incident at a summer camp near Sacramento where a 13-year-old girl died after one bite of a Rice Krispies square containing peanuts. My daughter doesn't have an anaphylactic reaction to anything--not yet--but this was a sober reminder of how deadly nut allergies can be.
Our next trip starts on Wednesday when we fly to Nova Scotia for my parents' 50th wedding anniversary. We often go to NS in August and last year, coming back, we spent an extra day in Newark airport thanks to United Airlines, which we are NEVER FLYING AGAIN. I had run out of any moisturizer or steroid, which was my fault--but try finding fragrance-free moisturizer in the airport shops. Not going to happen. By the time we got home, my eczema was out of control and took several days to cool down to a point where I could appear in public.
Also, being out of food and having a kid with allergies in an airport was a different kind of nightmare. You can't find an ingredient list anywhere and everything seems to have nuts or dairy or whatever. My daughter was essentially reduced to eating potato chips for the better part of 24 hours, but we did gamble on getting her noodles from a random Asian restaurant. Just glad, now that I know she's allergic to sesame, that Asian restaurants in airports are far from authentic.
So this year? I'm going to bring too much moisturizer. And we're going to pack a day's worth of safe food for my daughter.
Hopefully we won't need it--we're flying Air Canada.
