Tuesday

Do you ever have weeks where you are just so busy! It's now Friday afternoon and I'm finally sitting down and posting - thanks to a little reminder from Katie. It's good to know that someone loves my blog!

Our week has gone like this - Madeleine and Juliette had there 4th and last MenzB shot on Tuesday. MeNZB is a vaccine against a specific strain of group B meningococcus, currently being used to control an epidemic of meningococcal disease in New Zealand. However, meningococcal disease can cause meningtis and septicaemia, resulting in brain damage, failure of various organs, severe skin and soft-tissue damage, and death. It's been a horrible disease that has affected many children here in New Zealand. Thankfully the epidemic now seems to be over and the vaccine has been withdrawn. I'm pleased however that my girls do have some protection over this in the unlikely case that they come in contact with it.

However a new vaccine has been introduced for Pneumococcal disease. I don't really know anything about this but all our girls don't qualify for the state funded injections. I hoped we might sneak in with prematurity but you have to be under 28 weeks gestation and obviously at 32 weeks we don't qualify. Hopefully I will get the chance to do some research over the weekend. We do have the option of paying for the shots but at $150 per shot (each girl needs 3) I'm hoping that I will find that our risk level is very low.

Anyway the girls were fine with this last set and now we have no more inoculations until they are 15 months old - and that just seems like forever away!