Family and Vaccines

This week, Evie had  Monday off so she helped me with a project I've been wanting to do for a while.  When Grandma Jeanne died two years ago, a lot of family pictures ended up at my house, and one of those is this picture of my great-great-grandparents and my great-grandfather (sitting on his Dad's lap).  This picture has been stored for years without any frame or protection, and since it came to me, I have been really concerned that it might get damaged somehow.  So Monday, Evie went with me to Michaels and helped me pick out a frame for it.  It hasn't been hung up on a wall yet, because I can't decide where I want it to go, but knowing that it is protected is nice.

We also looked through the leftover Christmas and Hanukkah stuff at Michael's and we did a little math lesson about percentages to figure out how much things would cost based on how much they were marked down.  Evie quickly caught on to figuring out what 10% would be and then multiplying that by whatever the remaining cost would be.  

Evie didn't have any activities on the weekdays because her ballet studio is closed for the week between semesters.  It's a bit odd that they start their fall semester at the end of August and then come back for 2 weeks after New Years to finish that "fall" semester, but there were are.  So she had a lot of time to spend reading and getting her homework done early in the day and relaxing.  Her favorite thing to do is watch YouTube Kids on her iPad and we're trying to limit that - this is a major change that the pandemic brought because prior to the pandemic, she only used her iPad on trips.  Now she uses it every day.  That makes her no different from most kids, I guess, but I'm not sure now that she's in the habit how we pull it back.  

But she does plenty of other things around the house, including playing with the dogs.  She loves to chase them around the living room or pretend to be the fourth dog.

We have gotten a call from the school every day this week saying that someone in the school has tested positive for COVID.  Their policy is to alert everyone if there have been any positives in the building, but only the people who are considered to be close contacts have to quarantine.  They keep up with close contacts through seating charts for each class.  So on Thursday, in addition to the generic "someone has tested positive" call that we've gotten every day, we got a call from the principal to tell us that Evie was a close contact and would have to quarantine unless she a) has had COVID in the last 2 months or b) was fully vaccinated.  So, Evie being fully vaccinated, was still able to go to school.  But I am alarmed that other kids in her class had to quarantine because they hadn't been vaccinated.  I don't get it, to be honest....  This mrna mechanism of action has been in development for 30 years, and tested in humans since 2013...  It's not been rushed, it's just finally gotten all the funding it could eat because the world needed an answer to COVID.  Kids have all kinds of vaccination requirements to attend public school.  So I don't get the hesitancy of parents in vaccinating their kids against COVID.  But I'm glad that Evie still gets to go to school instead of having to quarantine since she has been vaccinated.  I can only make choices for my kid, and I'm glad we've chosen science so that she can continue to get uninterrupted education.