Isaiah with his best kitty Cisco, before we found out he was allergic to cats and had to find new homes for all 4 of our cats.

So the thing about allergies, both food and environmental, and asthma, is in order to help your child get through them it most likely means making a lot of changes in your life.  With food allergies, it might mean you only get your favorite foods when you are out without your child, and you certainly won’t be able to have them in your house anymore.  With environmental allergies and asthma most likely you will have to dust-proof your child’s bedroom if not your house.  Here’s the worst part, if you discover your child has asthma or environmental allergies and you have pets, you will have to determine if your child is allergic to those pets.  A child’s immune system is not fully functional until they are two, so the fact is your child might seem to be doing perfectly fine with your cat or dog, and then you have them tested at 2 and discover he’s allergic.  What do you do now?  How can you choose between your pet and your child.  Maybe you have had your pets much longer than your child 🙂  We  had 4 cats when we discovered Isaiah was allergic at 2.  Just by looking at him, you would never have known he was allergic, he didn’t really seem to have any symptoms, I mean he did have eczema, but we figured that was par for the course with food allergies.  The doctor explained that Isaiah would probably develop asthma no matter what, but as long as he was living with cats, he would be guaranteed to develop severe asthma and respiratory problems.  Let me ask you, would you be willing to gamble with that knowledge.  It was one of the hardest decisions we have ever had to make, 3 of the cats were in our family for 6 years at the time.  We had no choice, we began looking for homes for them.  It took 6 months to find homes for all of them, and we had to enlist the help of my family for foster homes, but we didn’t have a choice.  Our son’s health depended on it.