[didibus]

Right, allergies are likely a real thing, but I think there's many things nowadays where as soon as we hear of chances of something we go on this hyper vigilant avoidant mode, and that often makes the chances even greater, counterintuitively.

At some points, some things are bad luck, at least until we truly understand the mechanisms and causations.

[munchbunny]

Fortunately for food allergies, oral immunotherapy seems to be very effective if you can catch the allergy early (before 2 years old). We did for our oldest and the results are miraculous. It's a ton of work though, and I had more than a few near crash-outs from trying to get an 18 month old who doesn't really like the taste of peanut to eat a teaspoon of peanut every single day. That said, I don't regret it.

Even though we keep an epipen around and we make sure they're not eating peanuts, we don't practice strict avoidance anymore, we don't have to worry about the "processed on shared equipment" warnings, and there's no problem if he touches/inhales/eats peanut, meaning we can eat peanuts around him.