Rox and Roll

Exposing kids to disease should be a crime!

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I confess: I have a strong stand on vaccinations, and that is that vaccinations should be given on a schedule approved by a medical doctor to all children with as few exceptions made as possible.  I believe that these exceptions should be based on proven medical harm, such as severe allergy to a component (like the egg protein in a flu shot).  If parents decide to give kids shots on a delayed schedule, one-at-a-time, in order to monitor reactions, fine -- because at least they're innoculating their children.  The threat to my kids if they don't is too great, and I don't think that anyone should have the right to expose my children to disease.  I have argued until I'm blue in the face with various religious whack-jobs who feel that their God and fate should control whether or not their child -- or mine by association -- contracts and suffers from a disease.  These are the same parents who would let their child die before receiving medical treatment for a disease like diabetes.  I know some very educated people who are Christian Scientists, and I do not question their right to follow their faith -- but they should have NO right to kill their children through failure to treat them for disease that has no faith-based cure (like, all of them).  I submit that failing to vaccinate, should your child die from a preventable disease, is as criminal.  I believe in God and Christ, and I pray.  I pray extra when my kids are sick.  But I also took enough science classes to know that faith alone does not heal.  Some will say I'm blaspheming.  I call it Real Life.

Harsh?  Maybe.  I have one child who is as sturdy as an ox and another who has a compromised immune system for a myriad of reasons.  I rely on "herd immunity" to protect my child's health -- hoping that the few unvaccinated among us will simply never be around my kid.  When I recently heard someone at his nursery school talk of refusing vaccinations, it was all I could do not to plug my ears and sing "La La La" at the top of my lungs.  There's someone -- and probably more -- on his playground every day who hasn't been vaccinated.  That scares the shit out of me, for, as effective as vaccines are, they're not 100%.  And the more I dig on this issue, the more it appears that there may be a clustering of exemptions here in NoCal.  This means herd immunity may be compromised, which is unquestionably a bad thing for us all.  Doctors expect a measles outbreak to occur in this country because of parents refusing the MMR.  Is there a chance that such an outbreak will cause more harm than *might* be caused by the vaccine?  I hope we never know.

As for these chicken pox parties, puh-leez... Why not expose your child to driving without a seatbelt, secondhand smoke and swimming without a lifevest all at the same time?   CHICKEN POX IS A DANGEROUS DISEASE.  It can cause encephalitis, brain damage, even DEATH.  Why on earth would any good parent ever take the chance of their child getting this vaccine-preventable illness?  A family friend of ours who is a pediatrician watched her own child die from a chicken pox vaccine in her own arms, and even she will tell you that the chances of the vaccine being harmful are much less than the chances of chicken pox causing lasting damage to your kid.  God rest her child's soul, and thank God that she still believes in vaccination.

Look, I don't use words like "should" and "crime" and "religious whack-jobs" often, but I'm angry.  I'm angry that parents can go rogue with regard to vaccinations that protect my child as much as their own.  If my child is exposed to chicken pox and contracts it from a kid who attended one of these parties (because the parent didn't keep the child inside for a week afterward -- no one does!), then I will go after that parent to the fullest extent that the law allows. 

At the end of the day, yes, there are a blessed few people in this world who really cannot be vaccinated.  I'll pray for them not to contract a vaccine-preventable illness, as some hope is better than none.  But for all of the parents out there who think that they know more than doctors, scientists, public health officials, etc. -- you just plain don't.  And you don't have a right to risk harming my child.  I don't think you should have a right to risk harming yours, either.  Vaccinations save lives.  For the sake of the children, I hope that herd immunity protects these victims from their parents' ill-informed decisions.  I also hope that the laws tighten before the cluster of exemptions grows large enough to do some real harm.

Daddy can do it, yes he can, if he can't do it... well, I won't. He'll learn.

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The latest Juice Box Jungle episode on fatherhood (above) ought to be must-watch for first-time mommies who haven't figured out where daddies fit into the picture yet.  Sure, the guys helped to make the baby, but he didn't have to carry it inside him for nine months, shove it out of his ka-china (my son's word for it -- don't ask), and continue to have it attached to his boobies (Facebook be damned!) for at least a year after that.  How could they possibly know what to do with a baby when they haven't lived it like we mommies have?  Worse, put yourself in my shoes: my husband is the youngest in his family by decades, and he is an only child.  When I met him at age 16, my siblings were ages 7 and 8, and they were the closest he'd ever been to young children.  His learning curve with kids was going to be steep, naturally...

Fast forward to a decade later, when our first child, our daughter, came into being under circumstances we hadn't anticipated.  Instead of having our first child just as Daddy was wrapping up a two-year graduate degree, she was born at the start of his second year.  I was the breadwinner, and staying home from work was not an option; so I started working again when Petunia was six weeks old, and suddenly Daddy -- the student with the more flexible schedule -- was on duty.  The man with zero childcare experience became diaper-changer-in-chief, roller-of-the-stroller to mommy's office for nursing sessions, crying-infant-hall-pacer, etc.  Quite frankly, trying to return to work too soon while adjusting to new mommyhood didn't give me time to think about whether or not he was caring for the baby in the right way, whatever that was.  He was simply doing it -- and, in retrospect, I realized that he figured it out quite well on his own.  When he didn't know about something, he asked me, or he googled it!  (What did we do before the internet?!)

Fast forward another eight years, and our baby Petunia is now age 8, and her brother Dash is almost 4.  Mommy became an at-home parent with child #2, and Daddy is the full-time worker (as he has been since Petunia's first birthday).  With the addition of our second child, I worried... would Daddy have the same close bond with our son, for whom he is rarely the primary caregiver, as he does with our daughter?  Once again, Daddy figured out ways to forge that special bond in his very own way.  He has special things that he does alone with the kids (like a standing date for McDonald's pancakes on Saturday mornings while Mommy sleeps in!).  These days, there are a lot more things that Daddy does -- things like rough-housing, or letting the kids drink soda on occasion -- that Mommy wants to question, but, unless he's doing something that really undermines my full-time parenting routines, I keep my mouth shut.  It's better that he interacts with them on his own terms than under mine.  And while I sometimes find it unfair that Daddy gets to be more of a special playmate while Mommy's the rulemaker, there is no threat that works better than "I'll tell you father" when the kids aren't behaving.  They know that, at the end of the day, Mommy and Daddy are on the same team, pulling for the same great thing: raising happy, curious, creative, fun kids.  It's the trust in each other that we won't screw up the kids too badly that helps us along the way.