Sprinkles

Who knew something as simple as sprinkles could procure a nearly hour long conversation between J and I?

I made cupcakes yesterday for my little sister's birthday. Fantastically delicious dark chocolate cupcakes with dark chocolate nutella frosting. Yeah, yum! But of course, they're all brown, not very pretty, and so I decided I wanted to pretty them up with some sprinkles. Which brought on the conversation.

To sprinkle or not to sprinkle?

You see, Miss H has a food coloring sensitivity. So if she eats food coloring she ends up with a nasty case of diarrhea. It used to be that just touching it would break her out in a rash. But now she's gotten better, and so long as we wash her up thoroughly, and she's not touched/played with it for too long, it doesn't seem to bother her.

You do no realize all the things in the world that have food coloring in them until you have a babe that gets sick from it. Between her food coloring sensitivity and baby B's sensitivity to wheat, I've become a pro at reading labels. Mac 'n cheese, Nutrigrain bars, even marshmallows all have food coloring! Which, if we're being honest, I'm not really okay with feeding my kids artificial food coloring on a regular basis - sensitivity or not. This just makes me even more cautious.

Anyway. We can find a lot of natural foods around here. Naturally colored sprinkles are not one of them though. So to put sprinkles on the cupcakes means to put food coloring on the cupcakes. We went back and forth debating whether or not putting sprinkles on the cupcakes made us bad parents. If it was wrong, etc. We ultimately decided that a minimal amount of sprinkles would be just fine. It's not like a peanut allergy or something where she'd die, though probably terrible justification, I'm sure.

People warn you about a lot of things in parenthood. But they don't warn you about things like food allergies/intolerances and what a pain they are; for the kids and the parents.