a few loops of yarn - and new FA guidelines!

It's been a long day or three, despite a sunlit 40 minutes today with Nicole Snow's yummy recycled (and fair trade!) sari yarn. It's a slim, pleasantly random mix of fibers from sari fabrics, and is obligingly turning into a toddler's hat. Or so I hope.

(For those of you who are interested, I'm adapting one of the free Lion's Brand patterns, this one for the Elfin Baby hat. I've corkscrewed the hat's tail, and am using half double crochet instead of single, to accommodate the yarn's tendency to twist. The stitch count is still 1:1, even with my changes, although I added a chain of 15 to the initial chain stitches to make the corkscrewed tail.)

Eventually, though, I had to put down the yarn and go be a parent. Not that my efforts in this direction were terribly appreciated today, but alas, the Eldest was due to find some way to balance the wonderfulness of the parent-teacher conference.

Even so? oy.

So here I am, procrastinating on a last bit of editing that I need to do, and grumping. And, with a hat tip to Jenn, I ended up doing some verrrry dry reading in the place of the much less dry editing. But oh, worthwhile. The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases has released the new guidelines for the identification of allergies and their management. At last, a set of best practices for diagnosis - testing! standardized! finally! - and allergy management. Although I do note the deft ducking of the really tricky management questions, about outside of the home or clinic, still, ya gotta respect the rest of it.

Here's the summary, in tidy poster form. And the Wall Street Journal's article, with my favorite quote, It's especially hard to pinpoint a true food allergy in young children with eczema, since they make IgE antibodies to many foods. "If you did 100 food tests, all 100 would be positive. That's what we see from patients coming in from around the country," says David Fleischer, an assistant professor of pediatrics at National Jewish Health in Denver, which specializes in allergy and respiratory diseases.

Damn straight.

I did note that the NIAID's recommendations for managing anaphylaxis reaction seems to have removed antihistamine from the list of first response options for patients and parents, explaining that The use of antihistamines is the most common reason reported for not using epinephrine and may place a patient at significantly increased risk for progression toward a life-threatening reaction. Hm. Looks like it's time to put a call in to our allergy team, and to ask them if we should update the boys' allergy action plans...