Not my day

Whoever thought it would be a good idea for Leo to get ill on the same day the DVD player brakes?
How do you explain to a short tempered 2 year old that he can't watch Thomas, but he can watch Mickey Mouse club house, and that he just has to sit through the commercials.....

We need to trust our teacher

I couldn't help but listening in to a conversation in the gym locker room this morning. Two mothers exchanged Kindergarten experiences and it seemed they were both very unhappy with the level of communication between teachers and parents.
Turned out that they wanted to know, on a daily basis what little James and Caitlin has been up to. Did they enjoy music, did they have a healthy appetite, did they play, and with what and with whom? Did they solve their maths problems and did they know their alphabet.
- PTC twice a year simply isn't enough, said one of them. If the teacher don't want to talk to me at pick up, at least, we could get a weekly report on, like, a Friday, to tell me what's going on.

This seems to be a common problem here. Parents wants to know everything that is going on in their children's life, and I mean: everything.

I'm not a teacher but the average school class is 20-25 students. If the already over-worked teacher had to write 25 weekly student reports, where would he/she find the time.
This is one of those situations where you, as a parent, simply have to accept that James and Caitlin are growing up, and it is time to cut the cord. And let the teacher's do the job they were trained and hired to do.
Believe me: if the teachers has a reason to talk to you - they will contact you. If you don't hear from them, chances are you have nothing to worry about.
Maybe it is time to work on James' and Caitlin's communication, and not demand more of it from their teachers.

Things that make me see red

A snotty, out of control three year old who's kicking my son son three times, and hitting him over the face on a play structure whilst his mother his happily chatting away to her friends a few yards away. Once is excusable - we all have children with their bad days and manners and moods. Twice is dubious. Maybe keep him under close watch so that you can quickly intervene if it happens again.
Three times? Come on - it's time to remove him from the playground and ban his afternoon snack.

This is why we love each other

Some of my SAHM sisters has taken it upon them to make sure that there is always dinner on the table (or at least in a Tupperware in the fridge) for their husbands when they get home from work. This is their part of the deal. He brings home the bacon, she cooks it and places it nicely on a plate for him.
I didn't sign that contract so my husband can't always expect dinner (nor can he expect the kids to always be bathed, in pyjamas, homework done and bed time story out of the way but that's another blop post).
I usually cook something easy for the kids, like pasta or organic sausages with veg. Their schedule is different from ours. They have activities, homework and are hungry earlier than we are. Reheated pasta tastes awful, so there is no point in me cooking enough for myself and my husband to have later. And I'll be damned if I cook two sets of meals every night, I love my personal time after the kids are in bed far too much for that.

- They have it good, he sometimes says, referring to one of our male friends. She's such a good wife to him.
Those of you who don't know my husband might think he's serious but those of you who do know him, knows that he's not.
- Is there dinner, or should I pick something up on my way home? he asks.
- Take out? I retort, more often than I should.
We end up eating scrambled eggs and salad in front of the TV. Or tea and sandwiches.
- You are the best wife, my husband tells me. I don't expect you to cook for me. I don't want you to be one of those wives.
If he really means it, or if he's just telling me what he thinks I want to hear, I don't care to dwell on.
As far as I'm concerned, we're a perfect match.

down in one

Elin, whatever your decision with regards to your marriage to Tiger Woods, I will support it.
But if you do decide to stay in this marriage, please let it only be so that you can milk him of more money when you divorce him at a later date.
Today, he showed, once and for all that he really, really doesn't deserve you by his side.
The apology was staged, week and insincere.
Oh, and three months too late.
Truly pathetic.

To get by with a little help from a friend

We talked about our ambivalent feelings towards out lots as mothers in play group one day. Since I was the one with the longest track record as a SAHM, one of the other, part-time working mothers, asked me: how have you been able to do it for so long, without going absolutely completely insane?
Well, believe me, my sanity is long gone, and I am a mere shadow of my former self, but my reply was, without hesitation:
- You have to find a friend. Someone in the same situation, with children roughly the same age. But not only that. She has to be someone you would have been friends with even if you didn't have children.
That's the tricky part. You have to go out there and look long and hard until you find someone that you really can talk to. Where do you find this fellow mother?
Well, she's out there, somewhere you just have to look. Pushing a screaming toddler on the swing or doing the library reading time for the fourth day in a row - she's there.
Talk to her.
But if she insists on sharing teething traumas and best food mixers for purees, politely but adamantly steer the conversation away. You want to know if you like the same music. Watch the same movies. Knitting or crocheting? Cats or dogs? Camping or five star accommodations. Should Brad go back to Jen?
This is very important.
Because if you can't talk about the other stuff, you will never be able to really support each other through the baby-shit. This is someone you will spend a lot of time with. If you find the right mate, you might end up spending several hours, several days a week with this person. This will be the person that makes your life worth living. She will see your good sides, but more often, she will see your bad sides. So it is important that you are comfortable with her doing that, otherwise you won't be able to be your self. Trust me on this one. When the guards are down and you haven't had any sleep for five days and you're about to deal with the eleventh tantrum in an hour, could you really do this comfortably in front of someone who thinks Brad should stick with Angelina?
And when you are so baby-talked out that you will hit the next person who tries to share yet another cutesy story about some trivial baby revelation, you need to know that your friend will be OK if you move on to a quick re-cap of the latest Survivors.
Think about it. It has to be a perfect match for this to work.

Yep. Your fellow mother will be right hand woman, partner in crime, confidante and shoulder to cry on. She will become your new BFF through your journey as a mother and should be picked with great care and finesse. And if you find her, your life as a mother will suddenly have a new meaning. It will suddenly feel OK to be a SAHM.
She is out there, there is always someone for everyone. Take your time, try some on for size, see which ones fits the best and then make your decision. I am a great believer in soul mates:).
Dedicated to M and J - without you things back then would have been very, very different, xxxx

Noise is noise but sounds different to everyone

Any one who has tried to keep a toddler to play quietly for more than 10 seconds know that this is something of an impossible contradiction in it self. Toddlers, and children all ages, just don't play with the volume turned down. They can be quiet for a while, but rest assured, they all go up to eleven, sooner or later.
This has been recognised in Berlin, Germany today when a law was amended to exempt children from noise pollution. They can run, play, bounce balls, and generally cause a wild rumpus as long as they comply to the normal standards of quiet time, IE Sundays, and evenings.

An older friend of mine in the UK had recently moved in to her dream apartment, a ground floor flat overlooking a beautiful shared back yard which she shared with another five tenants, when she noticed that two other families had small children ranging from the ages of 2 and 7. The kids behaved as all kids. They woke up early, played chase around the flat, ran scooters up and down the badly isolated hard wood floors, and after breakfast they would all gather in the back yard and play ball and hide and seek, all the while using the full resources of their young voices while calling out for each other.
My friend found this intolerable. She couldn't understand the nerve of the parents who'd let this go on while decent people, like herself, tried to rest up on a Saturday morning after a long week at work. She felt that her privacy, and her dream, had been invaded by barbarians. She would wake up early in the morning and just lie in bed wide awake, waiting for the noise to start. She no longer felt she could keep the windows open to the yard for fresh air, she couldn't enjoy her coffee and papers in the afternoons. Her routines where no longer her own. Even though she was single and had no children of her own, she had to take other people in to consideration, and plan around other peoples lives in order to live her own life as she saw fit. She was distraught.
I suggested that she should, politely and humbly, talk to the families and see if they could come to some sort of compromise.
- Let them know what time you usually wake up in the mornings and maybe they could stick the kids in front of the TV until then. But living in a big city, noise kind of comes as part of the package.
It wasn't good enough. She stayed for another two months, then decided to sell up and move further out.
I understand how she felt. All she wanted was some peace and quiet.
But I can also understand the poor families with their children and their games, and toys. Try to keep it down? Eh.... what?
There are limits to anyone's patience, and I am a self-confessed bi*** when it comes to unruly children. But normal noise is normal.
If you don't like children - don't live next to a school. If you can't stand kids crying and screaming, don't sit next to them on the bus.
But parents: please respect that not all people think that little Charlie's cries of joy, and his snotty nose, and his incessant rants about snacks and his tantrums are as charming as you do when we all share a crowded bus on our way home in rush-hour traffic or try to have a lie in on a Saturday morning.

bed time routine, helicopter parenting gone very wrong

An anonymous mother posted a cry for help on an online parent chat forum about bed-time routines gone wrong:
"We have very good bedtime routines for our 5 year old boy. Massage, TV for 5 minutes and then we take him to his bedroom (we all share the same bedroom). We ask him if he'd like one of us to stay with him until he falls asleep, but he doesn't want to, and we allow him to stay in the bedroom alone and play until he gets tired. When that happens, he gets to go to bed by himself (I can see the bedroom for the other rooms in the apartment, so he is safe). Lately, he is up playing until midnight, and then he complains that he has bad thoughts. So he does this when he is his most tired, and says he thinks about elephants stomping around in the room, and I explain that there are no elephants in his room, and tell him to back to his room to either go to bed or play, but after 5 minutes he comes back again and start moaning about bad thoughts, and after the 4th or 5th time I loose my patience and tell him to just go to his room and stop thinking about it. I can't handle this, I don't think he has bad thoughts, I think that his craving attention, that he has turned down the offer of us staying with him until it suits him. How do I approach this? I feel that it is getting out of hand. Why does he always come to me, why not the father?"
Oh, dear. Where does one begin?
I try to stay away from chat forums as they only spark unnecessary aggression a lot of the times, but this time I felt inclined to answer. My reply?

"You say you have a good bed time routine, but as far as I can see, you have no bed time routine. A five year old is far from old enough to decide his own bedtime, nor should he be forced to make decisions about this (and he's not reverting his decision 4 hours later to spite you, I promise!). He's looking to you to sort this out for him. It is up to you, his parents, to create a solid, consistent routine, one which you won't stray from, and that he will recognize from one day to another. Brush his teeth, wash, read a story, have a little talk in bed with only the bed light on and the good night. And when it's bed time, he needs to stay in bed. It might take a few weeks to sort out, but trust me, you owe this to him."

I wonder what super-nanny would say about this:)?

OK, here we go - again. Why is it a mother's lot to fall ill with whatever flu's and aches her children decide to pass on, and not the father? After all, she is the one who still have to be well enough to take care of them...
I will take advantage of it being a three day weekend and stay in bed.

I need to work on my negotiation skills.
I wanted to go to the movies with a friend at 5, and offered my husband to take the kids to swimming in the morning in return.
This has now turned in to: I'll take the kids from 7 in the morning, give them breakfast, pack swim kit, get them dressed and washed, make sure Kate does her violin lesson, take them swimming and give them lunch and then drop Kate of at a friends house while he sleeps in and has a generally good day.

I really, really need to work on my negotiation skills.....

Different country, same worries

French feminist Elisabeth Badinter is criticizing the new "motherhood brand" in her new book Conflict, Women and Mothers. The 65 year old author claims that new mothering trends dictates everything from long women should breastfeed, what they should be feeding their children, if they should take pain killers while giving birth (no) and this leads to more women staying at home rather than going back to work after the birth of their children.
Being the "perfect mother" is a backlash rather than emancipation, and a trend we should be very careful to follow.

Things you find in hair

Lice check in school today. Why can't parents take their time to wash their kids hair before sending them to a lice check.
I found:

dandruff - mild or heavier
hairspray - old, stiff, at least a few days old
hairband - tangled up, impossible to get out of hair
glitter - assorted colors, enough to make a valentine's card
glue

No lice though.

(sometimes) breast is best? Bullsh*t!

I read this reader confession on the BadMommyBlogger site the other day, about breastfeeding, and how she felt that it shouldn't be anyone's business if she chose to bottlefeed her child. It stirred some emotions inside me, I had to leave a reply to the writer to support her quest:

Good for you girl! I tried breastfeeding my first whilst fighting severe PPD, having everyone around pushing me to keep trying while all I wanted was to (literally) kill myself. With the second one it was an obvious choice - bottle all the way. And even though I live in one of the most liberal city's on the utmost western part of this country (yes, SF) I managed to raise so many eyebrows I found a great competitor to plastic surgery. This is your choice and yours only. No one has the right to tell you anything! Believe me, there are times I want to say something to those mothers who are happily breastfeeding a clingy, whiny, 3 year old, but I refrain from doing it, because it is their choice, and I don't need to spend time with them if it bothers me that much. I am all for the fact that you have to sacrifice a part of yourself, and your life, when you have children, that's what parenthood is all about, but not at the COST of your own well-being and sanity. You have to be a happy mother to take care of your kids!

Bottom line is, all those smug "breast is best" mother should stop and consider one thing:
To force breast-feeding on mothers today is the biggest hypocrisy in a society which does everything to discourage it.
Fine, so smug breast-people out there have managed to dodge all the pit-falls of modern society and carved themselves a nice little utopia of breast feeding and Attachement Parenting, but the rest of us actually - by choice or not - live in the real world, and try our hardest to work around the increasingly tough demands that are forced upon us while raising our children.
We all try to do what is best for our children, to assume anything else is sheer ignorance. It might just not be to everyone elses taste, but please, keep it to yourselves.

This is not on

A friend told me that he had managed to get 5 hours sleep on a recent cross Atlantic flight despite screaming baby and a year old who watched Dora the Explorer in flight entertainment with volume up and no headphones.
I do a lot to keep my kids happy on a long flight, but Dora??? no headphones!!!
She's the most annoying excuse for kids TV I know.
Why didn't anyone complain to the flight attendant???

Helicopter parenting

Back in the days when Kate was a toddler, and Leo not even thought off, and we lived in London, I marveled over the amount of organized activities some SAHM's would schedule for their children. There was singing, music group, toddler tumble, baby swim, story telling and pottery class in abundance. Every day, another thing they needed to get to in time, and that always seemed to clash with nap times and feeding routines.

I would bump in to a mother friend on my way to the play ground and she would be busy maneuvering her stroller on to the bus, rushing to get from playgroup to baby ballet, "I don't have time to chat right now, let's meet for coffee next week." We'd never make it to coffee.

As I was studying for my MA and Kate was at nursery 2 full days a week, the days we had at home together, I simply didn't have the energy to have to be somewhere at a certain time. I needed to take the day as it came. We would hang out with friends in the play ground for hours, go for long walks and find pine cones in the park, weather permitting, or just have a four hour long play date which consisted of Kate and her friends turning the apartment up side down while me and the other mothers would drink endless pots of tea, read gossip magazines and talk about how sleep deprived we were. And I admit, we would scoff at the poor mother's who had signed up to a life with screaming kids on the public transport, constantly going somewhere, never ever standing still long enough to take a deep breath.

Then I moved to California. Kate started Pre-K. And if I thought mother's over-subscribed their kids in London, I was in for a huge reality check. Suddenly, baby swim and toddler music seemed like free play compared to Mandarin lessons, yoga classes, Violin and Arithmetic for pre school Einsteins which were all norm rather than exception. And that's not counting the weekend activities which were all out doors, and sports based. Soccer practice twice a week, and two games on Saturday. And then off for some light mountain hiking. By the way, this is 4-year old's we're talking about.

I have always felt that we are doing our children a disservice by over-scheduling organized activities. Along with activities comes and enormous amount of pressure to perform and become better (well, best) of your peers. The activities are not for fun - they are competitive and strenuous and will leave children feeling that if they are not the best, they are simple not good enough. But apart from physically exhausting our kids and turning them in to self conscious wrecks , we are also taking away the ability to figure out who they are, and what the world is all about. And most of all: we are not letting them be bored.
All kids needs to be bored. They need to learn to become creative with play and time. They need to develop their imagination. And they don't need a mother who drives them from swimming to hockey in five minutes flat, they need a mother who sits next to them on a sofa and talks about dragons, and dolphins and why the earth might be flat after all.

According to a new book by American therapist David Code, To Raise Happy Kids, Put Your Marriage First, this problem is now recognized as "helicopter parenting", which "creates anxious, exhausted parents and demanding, entitled children." He has a simple formula for happier kids: take the focus away from your children and move it on to your marriage instead. Because another side-effect of helicopter parenting are less time to spend with our spouse leads to empty and unhappy marriages. This could be one reason why divorce rates in the US are sky rocketing right now.

So cut down on the activities! Start to actually spend time with your little one's. Listen to what they have to say. Get down on their level and see how they experience the world, and still have time over to give your husband a hug.

Battlefield

I talk to a mother-friend of mine and we compare notes on how we have changed throughout the years, going from caring for one to two or more children. I admit that my tactics have changed with Leo, compared to how they were with Kate.
- I have become more relaxed, I say. I allow him to do more and get away with more stuff.
My friend nods her head in agreement.
- But it is also harder, I continue. This time around it takes more diplomacy, more sly tactics and clever negotiating. I need to use more force and be focused.
The look on my friends face has changed.
- It's not battle, she says. You're not strategizing a war.
- I might as well be, I say with a deep sigh. It's me against him and I need to be on top.

Twitter!

I have just entered a new phase, and you can now follow me on twitter: www.twitter.com/angrymotherca

I need this: (some things we argue about)

I am in desperate need for a holiday. Not one of those holidays where you leave your home for two weeks in order to rush around to visit friends and family all over the place and end up in more need of a holiday when you get back than you were before. No, I mean, a real holiday, sunshine, swimming pool, coconut smelling sunscreen, Margarita in hand, just the four of us, no one else.
Have talked to the husband about this, and he agrees. I'll book something, he says.
A week later nothing is booked. I gently poke him, but nothing happens.
Finally, he says:
- Well, I'm stuck at work, you're at home all day, why don't you book something.
This is where the argument explodes.
Let's not go down the: I'm working and you're at home doing nothing all day - road, shall we, instead, let's look at this objectively.
I mean, I think we all know that being a SAHM equals paid work away from home (not measured in money paid in to account every month, but rather the sheer exhaustion you feel by the end of the day), so it would be futile to start arguing about that.
No, I am carefully picking this apart and looking at it objectively:
I organize play-dates.
I research, and sign up to after school activities.
I am responsible for summer camps.
I book medical, dental and hair cut appointments - heck, I'm the only one who has these numbers in my phone.
I did the pre-school thing, with researching, filling in applications, going on tours and doing the follow-up's.
The rabbit, the vet appointments, becoming bona fide rabbit expert on food, molting, spaying etc, is my thing.
Library books, new clothes, old shoes, that's me.
Scheduling anything that has to do with up-keep of the house, chasing work-men, staying at home for hours waiting for them and then having to endure their work which always takes longer than they first say - oh, that would be me.
If my husband suggest we go out to dinner or a movie, he will always say: I'll book something, which he never does, and it falls on my in the end.
I am also room-parent for Kate's class this year, and I am not going to tell you how heavy that email-load is sometimes....

So, would it be nice to have something that didn't become my responsibility, just because I happen to stay at home all day?
Yes, is the answer.
I have no idea why all of this became my territory in the first place. So he's working? Big fucking deal. I seem to remember being able to schedule my own optometry appointments when I was still working, for my husband it is a miracle if he can call his dentist once a year, it's more likely to be every other year.

OK, so my husband is not a total looser, far from it. He's a great, loving, fantastic husband, who is never expecting any of this to be "my job". He never expects dinner on the table or the kids to be in bed when he gets home.
But if I don't do it, it just doesn't get done.
It doesn't matter if you live in the most equal marriage in the world, if one of you stay at home while the other one is working, the one at home will be the one who all the menial tasks fall upon, there is no way around it. The only way to change it is for both of you to go to work.

So, I have become one of those women.
And I don't like it.
I should just stop doing it, and wait for someone else to realize that it needs to get done.
But I do want that holiday, desperately.

I'm a real housewife, but I am not getting paid

I am a sucker for Reality TV and right now I am completely hooked on Real Housewives of Orange County. But whereas I thought that the ladies in Atlanta were pure quality entertainment with their over the top cattiness and constant one-up-manship, the Socal women are just sad. My heart goes out to any woman who feels the need to undergo such extensive and rigorous beauty regimes every day, because if they don't look their best their men will, apparently rightfully so, be unfaithful.... and while the Atlanta-sister had each other by the throat because of an inevitable clash of monumental egos, in OC the bickering and bitchiness boils down to two sad common denominators: insecurity and jealousy.

In Thursdays episode, the women and their spouses gather round for an alcohol infused housewarming dinner at one of the housewives (who gets served with eviction papers the very next morning - don't tell me this isn't pure, gut-wrenching comedy!) and end up laying in to one of the women for one reason only: the fact that she holds down a full-time job and can't go along to the luncheons, tupperware parties and pilates classes that they keep inviting her to.
- I work, the owner of a successful insurance company says. I don't have time to take 12-2 off on a weekday to go to the gym.
- And we don't work? one of the other women lashes out.

Cut to the same woman talking to the camera:
- I take care of three children (she has two nannies), and also keep my husband in a very satisfied manner (she works out five days a week, has botox injections, manicures, massages, facials and throws the odd frozen pizza in the oven), if that's not work, I don't know what is.

Well, honey, I do agree that it must be very, very time consuming and exhausting for you, but if you ain't getting a paycheck at the end of the month, it's not work. Call it what every you like, but work it's not.
I feel for the true working gal, she's as big a b*** as the others, but she was undeservedly pounded on.

We never stop judging

It seems that the media is out to criticize the Obama administration no matter what, and if it is a quiet day for the President, let's turn on the First Lady instead.
The latest "scandal" is that Michelle Obama has talked about the rising obesity problem by using a personal anecdote concerning her own daughters, Sasha and Malia. The girls' pediatrician had warned the mother about their weight and she admitted to putting them on a diet. It seems that the diet in it self is less up for criticism than the fact that Michelle deliberately put her daughter's lives out in the open when they are at such vulnerable age.

Whether this was a clever move on behalf of the First Lady, I'll refrain from commenting on. But fact remains: obesity in America is rising and especially amongst young children. The best thing a parent can do is nip it in the bud by teaching their children healthy eating habits, the importance of exercise and how to take care of the body that they will have to live with for the rest of their lives. Positive encouragement, plenty of it, and as soon as you suspect the need for it is the only way forward. Far too many parents choose to neglect this part of their children's lives and the horrible effects that poor eating habits will have on them.
The First Lady has done the right thing in rising awareness on this subject and by showing that the way of stopping this increasing problem starts at home, with the parents.

More sickness

Flu season turns parents in to suspicious and paranoid people and quite frankly, it's getting to me. As soon as a child has the slightest sign of a runny nose, parent's move far away and if you dare have the audacity to deliberately put your snotty child in a situation where there is other children - well you should be taken to the gallows.
I can't keep count of how many times I have been told that: your son has a slight runny nose, you should probably keep him at home, by a playgroup teacher or another mother. Well, guess what? Kids have runny noses. Their noses are perpetually runny from about mid October to the end of April every year for the first four or five years of their lives. That's normal! Annoying - yes. Unattractive - yes. But perfectly normal.
What bugs me is that other parents seem to think that I don't know my own child, and can't read the signs that will tell me weather he's sick or not (I am mostly referring to situations around Leo, when you reach 8, Kate's age, you have other, more pressing matters to worry about than a runny nose). I am a mother of two. I have been a child myself. I have probably had every childhood illness known to mankind, and if I didn't get it fast enough my mother made damned sure that I would play with a kid who did so that I could get infected and get it out of my system. (This was in the 70's, in Europe, long before immunization hysteria, when chicken pox was something you actually had to chase down the street rather than run away from).

Bottom line is, if my child was ill, I wouldn't expose him to environments that would in any way increase his ill-being. I actually love my child, there is no way I would do that. So common sense, if he's out and about, he's probably not ill. Or maybe he is, and I don't know yet, but then: though luck. I can't stay at home every time my child is showing the slightest sign of running a cold because I wouldn't actually leave the house for months.

So to those parents out there who have a snot-phobia, please trust me to take care of my own child, and if you are so worried that your child will catch something, then maybe you should stay at home.

(Alternatively: immunize your child against serious childhood deceases.)

To shoot or not to shoot

The whole swine flu epidemic/immunization hype seems to be calming down.
Against my better judgement, (yes, this will spark some controversy) Leo had his first shot, but Kate didn't.
I am a vaccination optimist. I think we should have vaccines, and I think parents should vaccinate their children. But I have never got my head around the flu shots. Flu, to me, is annoying, inconvenient and always bad timing, but very, very rarely lethal. I am also a firm believer in letting your body build your own immune-system against the illnesses that aren't immediately associated with potential further repercussions, so the flu-shot is where I personally has drawn the line, that is, until we had Leo, who is born with a minor heart defect and the issue of chest infections had to be considered more seriously than before, suddenly, there was a chance that flu, both seasonal and swine alike, could qualify as "illness associated with potential further repercussions".
So he had his firts shot, Kate didn't. 'Nuff said. We also gave him the seasonal flu-shot and of course, 24 hours later he was ill and had the worst rash immaginable all over his body. So did another boy in his play group.

But my pediatrician didn't get the H1N1 booster vaccine for what seemed like a life time, it was constantly being delayed, and we waited and waited and when they finally called me, 8 or more weeks before his initial shot, to say that they could shedule a time for Leo to have his booster and I have to say, I didn't hesitate when I declined to take him in.
Despite their difference in immunization status, both Kate and Leo had has their fair share of illness this winter, the high temperatures, the coughing, the sneezing, the constantly runny noses. I am still a devoted vaccination optimist, but I am making a very subjective conclusion with the evidence at hand that flu shots are just not for us.
I rest my case.