I have to saythat you have some great responses here regarding vaccinations but I will add just one thing. If you do not feel 100% comfortable vaccinating your precious little one, then wait! You can never take it back.

I have no children of my own but I have researched the ingredients and adverse effects and weighed in on the pharmaceutical companies huge profit margin and I will never vaccinate my babies (and I’m a nurse!)

You have a beautiful family.

By the way – you said, you don’t really need any more toys & cloths (the food gifts are a great idea, though – a big help with your 02 girls keeping you busy, huh ?!), so I was wondering whether there ‘s anything else I can send from Germany ?!

Lots of love !!

♥ ♥ ♥

Re. vaccination:
I say now that I’m anti-vaccination, but I’m not a mom so I feel that my opinion is less valid and when I have children of my own the decision might be more difficult than I anticipate. I’m sure you know this already, but vaccination has been connected to autism as well.
(Wait, I just scrolled up and see that someone already covered autism – but I’ve read about it too.)

The photos are fantastic.

about the soother, i can’t recall at what age i did this, but we used to bounce maggie on the ball pretty much all the time for those first 6 months or so, and she WANTED the soother, but always spit it out cause she was in so much pain, so when i would bounce her, i would angle her so her face was against my arm and my arm would hold the soother in until she relaxed enough to accept it… that strategy was a miracle for us! (maggie got bored of the soother once she could suck her fingers, and now she’s a full-blown thumb-sucker – and we LOVE it!!)

i watched “Vaccinations?: assessing the risks and benefits / Jay Gordon” on DVD from the library, but maggie was many vaccinations in at that point… if i could do it all over again, i would follow Dr. Gordon’s suggestion (for a typical child like maggie), and only get the whooping cough vaccines… but i’m just glad i stopped before the MMR shots… i do believe that mercury has been taken out of most (all?) vaccines now, which is good, except that instead they’re using aluminum now – NOT good…

i am also reading Mother Warriors (Jenny McCarthy book on autism) right now, and Dr. Gordon wrote the foreword, and it is AMAZING! in it, he says that Dr. Sears has recently pointed out that on the one hand the American Pediatrics Association states that the toxic level of aluminum for an infant is 20mcg, and yet the APA recommends a set and schedule of vaccines that has the hep B vaccine given at birth which contains 250mg and then the vaccines given at 2 months of age add up to as much as 1875mcg given all at once!!! and then more at 4 months, 6 months, etc! isn’t that just the most unbelievable thing you’ve ever heard??? oh yeah, and aluminum is toxic to the BRAIN and these mega doses given all at once is what causes these often irreversible injuries! yikes!!!

ahhh… well… i could go on and on, couldn’t i? but that was the most important thing i’ve learned recently (the doses of aluminum in today’s vaccines DESPITE knowing that they vastly exceed known toxic levels), and then of course, that Vaccination DVD was truly eye-opening to me when i first started looking into all of this stuff… he really goes through each and every disease and helps you assess if you think your child needs immunity against it… he also says that they shouldn’t lump so many of them all together on the same day… i guess that’s the concept of doing your own schedule of the vaccinations…

do you recall which professor it was that we had at carleton, that used to say over and over again that the pharmaceutical companies were the richest corporations in the world? i’ll never forget that… big business in sick care, i mean health care!!!

anyway, best of luck with your decision… i encourage you to do your research before letting them stick her with a needle of THEIR choosing with ingredients unknown to you! if you don’t have time to do it before your appointment, just STALL the vaccines until you feel fully informed!!! one of my best friends has a daughter with autism, and indeed she began to regress upon getting the MMR vaccine… quite sad…

lots of love to you and your family! i hope the appointment goes well! and thank you so much for the post!!!!

I’ll email you some info I put together on the different recommended vaccinations, and what we decided to do.