I have a very long post on vaccinations brewing in my head. So before I get into all that, I thought I'd give some background on where I'm coming from with regards to vaccinations.
Littles was fully vaccinated through two months of age. She received:
- First full day of life: Hepatitis B vaccine
- 4 weeks of age: Another Hepatitis B vaccine
- 2 months of age: diphtheria-tetanus-acellular pertussis (DTaP), inactivated polio (IPV), pneumococcal conjugate (PCV), Hib, and the oral rotavirus vaccine
The two Hepatitis B vaccines weren't too bad, but the week or so after her 2-month shots was awful. It's hard to explain. There was nothing "wrong," nothing where I could take her to the doctor and say, "What is going on with this?" The best way I can explain it is that she just wasn't my baby. Normally easygoing and happy, she was really fussy and out of it. She would pull off when nursing and just scream like she was in pain. It was awful.
Luckily, she came through it. But between her 2 month and 4 month checkups, I started doing more research on vaccinations. To make a very long story short, Littles did not receive any more vaccines until she was 16 months old.
Since then, we've been vaccinating on a delayed schedule. Littles gets two vaccines at every checkup. Hubby and I sometimes have preferences as to which ones she should get, our doctor gives us her two cents, and then we decide together what to do. At this point, she's only missing three shots, although those will probably get delayed a little longer than usual to squeeze in her seasonal and swine flu vaccines (highly recommended by our doctor this season, due to my pregnancy).
I was a little nervous when we started vaccinating again, but the difference between getting 5 vaccines at 2 months of age and getting 2 vaccines at 16 months of age is... well, huge. The worst that has happened is that Littles has had some bad leg pain on the night after receiving the vaccines. But even through that, she was still my baby. Thank goodness.
Hubby and I haven't discussed what we'll do with regards to vaccinating Noob. Honestly, I'm not sure that waiting until 16 months to resume vaccinating Littles was a good idea, so I lean towards starting earlier with Noob. But I do still want to space them out -- I don't want Noob ever getting five vaccines in one day.
To bring this post back to the working-mom theme of this blog, one common misconception I see is that unvaccinated/partially vaccinated kids cannot attend daycare -- obviously, a huge issue for working moms. This is not always the case.
Nearly half the states allow philosophical exemptions to vaccinations. Here in Texas, that meant that in order to enroll Littles in preschool, we had to fill out a state-provided form indicating which vaccines we do not want her to receive, get it notarized, and submit that to the preschool along with her (obviously incomplete) vaccination record. Part of the deal is that if there is an outbreak of a disease that she's not vaccinated for, she may not be permitted to attend preschool until the outbreak is over. We'll take that chance, thanks.
If you're not in a philosophical-exemption state, all other states provide a medical exemption for school enrollment, and all but two states (Mississippi and West Virginia) provide a religious exemption. From what I've heard, both of these exemptions are much harder to obtain than a philosophical exemption, but it is something to look into if you feel very strongly about avoiding or delaying vaccination.
I have much more to say on this topic, but I'll leave it at that for now. The bottom line is that I do believe in vaccination in general. (If I didn't, then I never would have agreed to resuming vaccinating with Littles.) I'm just not happy with the way it's implemented in the USA today, for a variety of reasons.
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