A neighbor posted on our community Facebook asking if someone could watch her 3 year old daughter for a couple hours the next day and feed her lunch before her babysitter picked her up while her mom went into work early.I'd only met them in passing, but when no one else responded after six hours, I offered. They're my neighbors and my son will probably go to school with their daughter. A playdate on my day off to get to know new-ish people didn't sound terrible. After I offered, someone who knew them better offered to be a backup.When I made the offer, I explicitly called out our pet birds and cats and asked if there were allergies to worry about. When she happily accepted the offer, I asked again about allergies and got reassurances that this would be great. Allergies kind of scare me, but as long as I can plan for them and make sure things are safe, they're easy enough to accommodate.When the mom dropped her daughter off, she causally mentioned her daughter has anaphylactic allergies to cats and birds, a number of plants, and a variety of unspecified foods. She didn't actually tell me which plants or foods, just mentioned these life threatening allergies existed, dropped the kid, and ran.I turned around to find her daughter plastered to the front door of my house as my friendly tabby cat advanced, purring comfortingly as this little girl whimpered in terror. This cat has a soft spot for toddlers and anyone crying. Talk about a recipe for disaster.I scooped the cat into the laundry room, scrubbed down my hands and was horrified to realize I couldn't find my other cat. The birds were loose, since most kids find them cool and exciting (they're big enough they chase the cats, not the other way around). I don't think I've ever caught them so quickly or roughly before. Not touching anything, this girl still started breathing funny. I moved her to open air and she regained normal breathing within a couple minutes.We ended up spending the playdate in my partially finished basement, because I knew no animals had been down there, no plants grew there, and was reasonably certain I could keep this kid alive for two hours under those circumstances. The offered back up didn't answer when I called to ask for help/advice.I had Benadryl measured out in case this kid started reacting to something again, because I don't have toddler-sized epi-pens laying around and her mom didn't respond to texts ignored calls asking what allergies this girl has or how to respond to a reaction.Finally I lost my temper and sarcastically asked if I should just feed the kid PB&J for lunch or would that kill her. That got me a terse "severe peanut allergy" text in response. The kid came with a prepackaged snack that we also had so I double checked ingredient lists to make sure the stuff we had was the same thing and essentially fed the poor girl a couple bags of snacks and plain toast for lunch.So her regular babysitter picked her up at the scheduled time, and I haven't heard anything else from them. It's been a couple days, and I'm still a little disturbed.Who does this?! Am I unreasonable for being furious that this little girl's mom would hide life threatening allergies until the last possible moment? Why would she not actually tell me what those allergies were? We arranged this the day before, there was time to let me know and prepare. My mother has severe allergies to normal house dust. I know how to clean a house to protect against these, but I still need more than 30 seconds of warning. I certainly wouldn't have gotten my pets out to greet a kid if I thought it would kill her.I'm also upset that there's been no response at all from her mom. Why not give an explanation or any sort of reason for this? I get that emergencies happen and things get forgotten, but this could easily have killed her kid.Am I overreacting? What do I even say to them the next time I run into them in the neighborhood? via /r/Parenting https://ift.tt/2xODLrd
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