Odds and Ends

To answer Linds' question in the comments about the Benadryl in the pencil case, they are Perfect Measure individual dose packets, which are a great improvement over the bottles in baggies we all seem to have carried around. Last month Sarah of No Whey, Mama mentioned the leaky bottle problem in a hilarious post linking to a a commercial. (When you go to the commercial, click on "Watch the TV Spot" in the upper right hand quadrant.) There are a lot of us who've had purses "baptized by Benadryl!"

As a follow up to my post Hurricane Preparedness With Food Allergies, I finally have the information I promised about alternatives to medications given with a nebulizer, which requires electricity. The Kid receives two of them. He gets a daily maintenance dose of Pulmicort and on the occasions that he wheezes due to a respiratory infection we also give him Xopenex. When I spoke to our awesome pediatrician about options for when a storm has taken out the juice, he gave me inhaler samples of the Xopenex. Apparently Pulmicort isn't distributed as a standard puffer, so he gave me a sample of it to be used with a "Flexhaler," which I had to purchase. The Kid needs to learn how to use it, so we'll try the trainer with him and see if he can get the hang of it. If not, we might need to have a completely different medication to substitute for it in case of emergency.

UPDATE: Speedbump Kitchen let me know in the comments and I confirmed with the AstraZeneca Information Center that that the Pulmicort Flexhaler does have milk protein as part of the carrier for the medication. The package insert does not say so directly, listing "budesonide and lactose, an inactive ingredient." Many, many thanks to her for sharing her knowledge.

Now I have a confession to make. As much as I've loved finding both a food allergy community and a whole world of delightfully quirky foodies online, there's one part of blogging that I'm just not very good at. Quite a few of you wonderful people have given me "Excellent" or "Blogging With a Purpose" awards or tagged me with a meme, but I have never once passed any of them on or tried to figure out what my phobias are or what I was doing a decade ago. I have a hard enough time just getting posts up and answering email!

Last week I was tagged by both Speedbump Kitchen and Yummy Allergen Free with the same meme. So I surrender. Here are six random facts about me:

• I am a lapsed vegetarian. That may not speak well of my moral (or dietary) fiber, but going without meat for several years caused me to teach myself how to cook and to learn to adapt to dietary restrictions.
• I have a weakness for Japanese room escape games, especially beautifully rendered ones like The Bar.
• My nose was once broken in a freak accident when my backpack fell from a luggage rack while traveling by Eurail.
• I never wanted kids. (Oops.) Now my little guy is my whole universe.
• The night before my son was delivered by emergency c-section due to preeclampsia, I went out with my husband to a steakhouse which served buckets of peanuts and had peanut shells covering the floor, where I ate coconut shrimp for dinner. No wonder the poor kid came out blue!
  
• I am a natural redhead.
  

Now on to my victims. Feel free to continue or ignore the meme according to your preference.

• Aparna of My Diverse Kitchen
• Janeen of Our Story
• Jenny of The Nut-Free Mom
• Maggie of Dog Hill Kitchen
  
• Nicole of The Riggs Family
• Shellyfish of Musings from the Fishbowl

Should you accept this imposition, here of the rules:

• Link to the person who tagged you.
• Post the rules on the blog.
• Write six random things about yourself.
• Tag six people at the end of your post.
• Let each person know they have been tagged by leaving a comment on their blog.
• Let the tagger know when your entry is up.

Finally, I will be hosting the next Living With Food Allergies Blog Carnival. Submissions are due by 10pm EST tomorrow night.