An allergen free birthday?

The girls go to a school that we really love. There are just a few things that get really annoying. One is their inflexibility with giving "medical" things like pedialyte, lotion, chapstick, or diaper creme without a doctor's note and how overly cautious they are about potential infectious illnesses. The second is how they deal with allergens. If the girls had food allergies there is no place in the city I'd feel safer bringing my kids. But since they don't have food allergies, I have to admit to selfishly finding it plain annoying.

They have a no peanut rule. That's fair. Peanuts can be a nasty allergy. But they don't stop there. No peanuts, no nuts, nothing that has been made on equipment that shared tree nuts, nothing with coconut palm oil, nothing that may have been breathed on by someone who may have four days ago eaten a Chick Fil A sandwhich cooked in peanut oil...you get the idea. You have to provide a full ingredient list ahead of time and if made from a bakery, it must certify that it wasn't made on the same equipment that nuts may have touched. As a general rule, bakeries won't do that. So cupcakes and cookies are out. They suggested I just bring in Jello. But they apparently don't know me very well. I wasn't about to just plunk down some Jello cups and call it a day.

Interesting fact for the day: There are 49,255 products available in the average 45k sq ft mega mart (Yes, I actually looked that up. I've mentioned before I am an ultimate nerd researcher). Fact number two, I'm pretty sure that about five of those 49k products meet the criteria mentioned above. I spent foverever in the grocery store reading labels and trying to come up with something better than Jello.

Once I finally had a plan, I had to take everything in the day before for the allergen Nazi inspection. They read every ingredient, looked for any allergy warnings, and finally approved my treat. Here's what I finally came up with: Mayfield vanilla ice cream cups (not birthday cake flavor, those have coconut oil). On top of that I crushed Oreo cookies so they looked like dirt. I was going to add gummi worms, but they got nixed for being choking hazards. So instead I found these little bug cookies and put those in the "dirt." For little favors they all got a felt play watering can and a little pot with a daisy seed kit. See the garden theme I was trying to go with here?

Reagan knew it was her birthday. I recycled her birthday dress from last year since I was too late to get a new dress made. It only had one candle on the dress, but little did I know that would just match her debacle of a cake later. When I pulled the dress out she lit up and started saying, "It's my birthdaaaaay! It's my birthdaaaaaay! It's my birthday party!" and started into the most spirited rendition of "Happy Birthday to you" you've ever heard. She was so excited to go to school in her birthday dress (good thing it was Friday) and was SO looking forward to her party later that afternoon. Here she is telling me, "It's my birthday, my birthday dress!"

Of course, we hadn't even made it home from dropping them off in the morning when the daycare called and mentioned they noticed a suspicious rash on her arm. They actually wanted us to come get her. After all that work of getting the treat and as excited as she was, I was not about to go get her and have her miss her party over some rash. The kid has allergies and gets rashes all the time! To keep her there, I went back and forth with the school and the doctor's office all day. The school ended up emailing me pictures which I sent on to the doctor who then relayed it doesn't look like any big deal, cover it with a bandaid and let her stay. But as luck would have it, when we showed up for the party at 2:30, as we walked in the door they told us Bailey was running a fever of 101.2. So after spending all day trying to stay out of the doctor's office, I called and asked if we could bring them in. Here she is sporting said "suspicious rash."

Reagan did get to have her party and had a great time. She gets a little weird when everyone sings Happy Birthday to her. We sung it three times over the course of the weekend and every time she gets the same look on her face like, I'm not sure what to do here.

Once the party was over we rushed them off to the doctor, who by then was waiting on us. Bailey had a virus, Reagan had a typical generic rash and she was good to go back to school. The doctor wrote a note saying, "Reagan may return to school on Monday." and told Reagan, "you hand them this note and tell them to leave you alone." But that's not the end of the rash story...