Wednesday, June 26, 2013

A little perspective goes a long way

Last Tuesday was an epicly bad day. First, Vance pulled off his diaper after being awake a total of 45 seconds and pooped all over the floor and then a few other things really caught me off guard and I decided I had to get out of the house. Matt was about to leave for work and noticed that one of my tires was so low that I had to take it to the shop immediately, like before I even did anything fun. I had plans to go to the zoo and the pool with some friends, but when Matt called the car shop they said it would only take 30 minutes to fix the tire and we would be on our way. Long story short, we were there for 2 hours and 45 minutes (do NOT attempt by yourself, it was not fun with a feisty toddler), and shelled out $160 for *one* new tire. However, there was a sweet lady who was there with her car and had children my age and she kept Vance entertained for our last hour there.

This woman noticed Vance's cloth diapers and was so excited to see someone using them and she was so interested to hear about how it worked. She also witnessed Vance nursing and ended up talking to me about parenting and asking a lot of questions about our philosophies. Somehow, our conversation turned to the fact that Vance has food allergies. She just shook her head and said how sorry she was that we had to deal with this and how unfair it was that obviously good parents got stuck with such a horrible situation. She just could not understand how parents that cloth diaper, breastfeed, make all of and limit our non-organic/GMO food, and who are very informed about decisions we make for our child's health, could have a child with food allergies while there are parents out that that put Mt. Dew in their baby's bottle and eat McDonald's every meal, parent's that do drugs, and basically parents that don't care about their child's health at all and they get perfectly healthy children. She told me how much it disgusted her; it just was not fair in her eyes.

Sometimes I can feel this exact same way, but I honestly am so happy that we are the ones that are dealing with this. I'm not happy about Vance having to go through this, of course, but I am happy that we are the parents that care enough about their child to do something about his allergies. If Vance had been born to any other family, there is a possibility that he may not get the care that he needs. I can imagine, and have witnessed, parents of children with food allergies either not wanting to acknowledge the allergy because of how much work is involved or simply not caring enough to notice it. For example, how many people would start making every single thing from scratch in order to avoid garlic and never ingesting a drop of it themselves? I'm not saying that no one else would and I'm not saying I'm some sort of hero mommy, but there are sucky parents out there that would think that was a lot of work and that he might just "get over it". I had never really thought about his allergies from that perspective until I was faced with someone else telling me how unfair our situation was.

 I ended up talking to my friends that day at the pool (we missed the zoo) and we all talked about how there were things in our life that others had a hard time understanding. We agreed that you "just do it" when confronted with any situation, especially when your children are involved, that might be difficult. One women is a mom of 3 and gets asked how she does it all the time, or the mom whose husband gets deployed, or the women who uses a SNS (supplemental nursing system) filled with donor breast milk to feed her child because she doesn't make enough...We just do it, we just deal with these things because we have to; there is no other option.

I guess what I am trying to say is that I'm glad we have the means, the knowledge, and the attitude needed to do everything possible to give our son the best care. For so many reasons, including his allergies, I am so glad we are this silly little guy's parents.




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