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Don’t Forget To Add This To Your Back-to-School Checklist

 

This post was developed in association with the Ontario Ministry of Health and Long-Term Care. The opinions of the author are her own.

Vaccines Up To Date

The school year was already in full swing when I got the letter. I almost ignored it at first, tossing it onto the stack of mail piling up in the front hall. You know the one. It’s next to the pile of shoes, jackets and hats; across the room from Lego mountain; and down the hall from the pile of school forms yet to be signed.

But the official-looking envelope caught my eye and I opened it. It said that my daughter was behind on her shots and would be expelled from school if we didn’t get caught up asap. What? I have always been steadfastly and vocally in favour of vaccinating my children. How did this happen?

So my first reaction was that there was some sort of mistake. Obviously.

Pshaw. My kids have had all their shots. This is just some sort of mix-up.

I would just need to dig up that yellow vaccination record to clear it all up. Easy peasy. So easy, in fact, that I can safely put it off to do later, you know, when I get around to it.

Ahem. So eventually I got a second letter that was basically all, like, we already warned you so now we are for real going to kick your kid out of school if you don’t prove her shots are up to date by this specific date in the very near future.

Oops.

So I went down to my basement office and found the vaccination records of all three kids and realized that I hadn’t bothered bringing them in to get updated by the doctor for several years. They were no help at all.

I called the doctor’s office and was able to get my daughter’s actual record emailed to me. I cross checked it against the shots she was supposed to have received and discovered that she really was missing one. I was actually shocked.

As it turns out, that particular shot had only recently been made mandatory and had somehow slipped through the cracks. Perhaps if I had been bringing in my yellow card for regular updating, my doctor would have noticed. But let’s not point fingers!

In the end, I managed to squeeze in an appointment to get the shot before the quickly approaching deadline and had the doctor update all three of my kids’ vaccination records while we were there. Then I hopped online and updated the public health records and all was right with the world.

Well, I could still use some help with the piles of stuff in the front hall, truth be told.

BUT THE GOOD NEWS IS YOU CAN LEARN FROM MY MISTAKES.

Scheduling regular check ups and making sure our vaccination records are up-to-date is now part of my back-to-school routine. Add it to your own checklist and cross another worry off your list. This Ontario vaccination schedule is super helpful for keeping track of your kids’ Immunizations.

This post was developed in association with the Ontario Ministry of Health and Long-Term Care. The opinions of the author are her own.