Vaccinations

Poor us...today was our second round of vaccinations for living/traveling in Indonesia. We started our Japanese Encephalitis and Rabies vaccines a week ago. The Japanese Encephalitis vaccine for children wasn't available in Houston at the time we went to get our travel vaccines. We were going to forego the rabies vaccination but we were told that the rabies shots one gets after being bitten are often not readily available. Audrey loves animals and Mommy and Daddy have had a hard time keeping her away from stray cats. We have a friend whose daughter was bitten by a stray cat so she got the painful shots in the stomach.

The rabies vaccination is good for 10 years. The Japanese Encephalitis vaccine is effective for 4 years. Mommy is sure the kids feel like pin cushions. They dread each visit to the doctor. Audrey is by far the worst one when it comes to shots. She really puts on quite a show. The cost for vaccines is cheaper here than in the US. They were$60.00 per shot here so $600.00 total for the whole family. In the US it would have been roughly $200 per shot and for Japanese Encephalitis and Rabies it is each a series of 3shots. Still, even with the discounted rates, the cost for the vaccinations for our family of 5 is shall we say maybe more painful than the shots! We do get reimbursed eventually, but we have to pay for everything out of pocket first.

Now that we have a plethora of vaccines under our belts, we could probably travel anywhere in the world with the exception of Africa since we have not been vaccinated for yellow fever. Daddy did say he wanted to visit Africa sometime so maybe we will end up with yellow fever vaccinations at some point...not anytime soon though :)