Hello, and welcome to Serious Inquiries. Only this is episode 394. I'm Thomas Smith.

And today's expert is none other than Lydia Smith. How are you doing?

Hi, pretty good. I'm an interesting expert today. Yeah, a sad one. Yeah, this is this is going to be a tough one. How do we even begin? First off, hello. Hi, everybody. Thanks for joining us. Let's start with happy bonus reminders. Yeah, that hang out is coming pretty quickly in about a week, October 26th at 3 p.m. Pacific 6 p.m. Eastern. And that's for the top two tiers of patrons. We're going to do a zoom. Lydia will be there. I will current expert

Lydia Smith will be there. I'll be there. And after the Q&A and the talking and all that, we're going to play games with the top top patrons. Already got plenty of signups. Can't wait to play some code names. So fun. Maybe Lydia and I will be the code masters and we'll see who can win. I don't know what we're going to see. You're way better. And then also seriously alpha movies. Good will hunting coming up also right around then all good reasons. Plus avoid the bullshit auto ads. And if you

can't afford to become a patron by all means, please skip those ads. But if you'd like to save yourself having to do that, patreon.com slash shares pot. Okay, all those more fun things aside, there are a lot of causes in the world and things to care about and all that. But like for us personally, Lydia and I, all that takes a back seat when someone's trying to murder our child. And so as much as this is a little bit particular to us today's episode, I promise it's important and it's

something that also has to do with government and trying to get things done and what can even happen under the best of circumstances and when people have good intentions and try to accomplish something and how it can go wrong. I mean, there's a lot here. So I hope you'll listen because someone's trying to murder our kid. And they could also be trying to murder your kid. It's possible. You don't even know about this. But that's what we're going to talk about. And so where do we want to begin? Well, I guess our story. A lot of you may know.

For some of you, anyway, may know Arlo has food allergies. And the way that we've learned about those is from a very young age. When he was about five months old, he reacted to a peanut butter puff. And we ended up doing skin testing after two reactions to it. And he had an immediate reaction in the allergist office. And they they marked it as you are absolutely allergic to peanuts. They also did some testing for tree nuts, just to kind of see what those potentials look like for him.

And he was cleared for a certain number of tree nuts. And then we actually did a challenge to make it. So almond would be safe for him. And he passed that, which was great. And then we also challenged hazelnuts. So Nutella is on the menu. And that's great, great opportunity for the kid never eats it. We got to give them that.

Yeah. That's true. And then the next few reactions that he had were all at daycare, which as a working parent is really, really scary. Yeah.

To get a picture on your phone and a phone call while you're in the middle of a work day, like in a meeting, that something is wrong with your kid. And the first reaction he had was to eggs. They were having breakfast. And he was still in like the infant room.

And we did blood testing because he had a variety of foods for breakfast. It wasn't just eggs. It was several things. So they did blood testing for all the foods that were present at breakfast and egg white and egg yolk both came back very strong as being a reaction.

We later also found out that he can't consume it in a baked good either. Some kids are able to eat egg once it's been baked because the protein has been broken apart in that method, not our low unfortunately.

I can't emphasize enough how horrifyingly scary this is. And you get a picture of like your kid's face exploding, like just a giant thing on his face or or anything. Yeah.

And he gets hives all the time. And you know, you do get used to it. Like I always say, I'm having hives again, allergic reaction. And it gets less scary for those smaller ones, but like for the bigger ones, it's never not terrifying.

Why is this anything that you all should care about?

Well, I first want to say that one of the hardest things about living in the cruel, awful world that we live in is how many people are mad at us for our kid having an allergy. Yeah.

A lot of people and I said an allergy is a hundred apparently that's that's an awful thing for us to have done. Sorry, everybody that we did that apparently we're the bad people.

It's really amazing. We don't ask anyone to do anything different either. We get that this is not your problem. There are things that would be nice that are considerate that that we would appreciate if people do, but like we largely you'll hear a little interview with our little expert Arla later.

I mean, we largely just take care of this ourselves places like daycares. I think it's great that they accommodate us. Not all of them do when we're looking for daycares.

There's one that we had to pass up on, right? Yeah, it was a daycare. I really liked in a lot of ways. And so I asked them about their allergy policy. They said, well, we don't really have one. And I was like, what do you mean?

Yeah. And you know, a lot of schools at the very least say that they're not free because peanut allergies, tree not allergies are so intense. And this school said, oh, well, you know, we just let the kids have just let the allergic ones die. And then that we did out.

They basically said, yeah, you just bring food from home and the kids sit in their spot. And I just was like, thank you for your time. Yeah.

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