When you are Brittany and Patrick Mahomes, having children who are and will become interested in sports, is almost a given. Yet, something that was not a given for the parents-of-two were food allergies. In a recent interview with Parents.com, Mahomes opens up about her children’s food allergies and how she has become an advocate for them.

Mahomes told the outlet that her two-year-old daughter, Sterling first started showing signs of allergy when she was given formula for the first time.

“She was vomiting; she was sneezing; she had red, itchy eyes,” the 28-year-old mother recalled. She went on to say that although it wasn’t a serious reaction, they consulted their pediatrician and then an allergist. Mahomes said that she and her husband became more proactive because of Sterling’s incident in terms of potential allergen exposure for their 14-month-old son.

“We were doing an early introduction,” she recalled. “We started with milk, and then went to eggs.” However, when they added peanut powder to Bronze’s formula, he had an allergic reaction. “I took his diaper off and I then realized he had broken out into hives everywhere under his diaper and his clothes. Within minutes, it began to grow and grow, and eventually covered his whole body and got up to his face.”

Mahomes was prepared as she had an AUVI-q, an FDA-approved epinephrine auto-injector for infants and toddlers. “Knowing that I did have that with me, I felt a little more competent in the situation, but we did end up going to the emergency room. They ultimately told us, ‘He’s going to be fine, but you need to wait here for a few hours just to make sure everything’s OK.’”

As a result of her own experiences with having two children with severe allergies, Mahomes has partnered with Kaléo, makers of AUVI-q, to raise awareness of allergies in children.

“As parents with kids with food allergies, you have to be confident in advocating for your kids and you have to keep them safe; you have to make sure everything around them is safe,” she told Parents.com. “Never feel bad for speaking out for your kiddos.”

According to Food Allergy Research and Education (FARE), about 5.6 million kids—or one in 13—have food allergies in the United States. Per the statistics, approximately 40% of those children are allergic to more than one food. Food allergies in kids are on the rise with peanut or tree allergies tripling for kids from 1997 to 2008.