Yes/no vaccinations for new baby on Canada - France travel? - Page 2

[MeepyCat]

On pure, uninformed speculation, I am imagining this trip as a plan to spend part of your baby's early infancy with a loving extended family in a beautiful location. Or a piece of extended gastro-tourism best undertaken while your child is not in one of the phases when s/he can ruin your lunch by throwing a tantrum over stinky cheese. A way to pass the time while your house is remodeled. Rootstock shopping for a vineyard. Fact finding for a novel. Or a long-cherished plan of some kind, which will only be more delightful in the company of your new baby.

I'd like a few months in the South of France myself - I envy you. I hope nothing happens to upset the plan, and you all have a lovely time.

I think you should find a ped there. Do the standard wcv with a ped in Canada before you leave, making whatever vax decisions you like. Get copies of the medical records to bring with you, and pass them to a pediatrician there, continuing wcv on whatever schedule that ped recommends. When you return to Canada, get copies of the medical records again.

[lulu27]

Oh my, thank-you so much everyone for the input!!!!!

I want to clarify that we are not automatically planning a trip to France until we know that everything is fine with the baby, and myself, and see how things go. We have talked with both my family doctor and our prenatal doctor and they both agree that pending the birth, that there are no complications baby-wise with health, and that I'm doing fine post-partum, that we're actually very likely candidates to do some early travelling. We're not hoping for the type of travel where we're doing constant day-trips and exhausting ourselves. Rather, we live now in a place where February/March are full of blizzards, snow storms, and city-wide shutdowns for snowdays, and spring is non-existant, and depression rates skyrocket during these months due to the terrible weather. My partner has two older children who will stay home with their mother, should we travel - and we hope to go rent a place for a few weeks and just sleep, breastfeed, be quiet, somewhere where the climate is a bit better and we have some peace and relax with our new baby outside of snowstorms and older children who require lots of driving to various lessons/events etc.

Neither of us are walking into this blindly - my partner having two children already, and I was a full-time private childcare provider for over 15 years of multiples, newborns, toddlers, and up to 5-7 children sometimes at a time, plus overnights. All of this will help, as well as my being a doula, and having many supports around us including friends who are lactations consultants and doctors who will do housecalls, friends who are midwives and doulas, to help us in the early days should there be breastfeeding issues or health problems. Of course, we're not booking anything until the baby is born and we see how things go, as there is no predicting despite all our hopes and preparation :) :) :)

That being said, we'd rather do lots of research in advance so that if it does work out, it will make it much easier!! I hadn't thought of doing vacs in France - we thought France as I've spent lots of time previously there, and thought it a bit less risky than perhaps somewhere in the Caribbean. I did indeed look up the travel warnings and disease info on Canada's Health Agency etc, and everything looks fine, except in the pyrenees which we can certainly plan to avoid.

But baby vacs are something, in all my experience, I know very little about, so any links, info, etc on these first vacs, how they help/don't help, people's concerns, etc, are all enormously helpful as we try to prepare!!! So yes, please keep it coming, and thankyou all so much!!!
 

[MeepyCat]

No need to thank me, at least.  DH and I had a fab time inventing complicated and awesome reasons for going to the south of France on our ride to work this morning.  :)

[ahdancesing]

When DD was born, pertussis was being passed from child to child in our neighborhood...and our house (the town where we live is one of the places in the US with the highest number of reported cases).  Two of the four children who live in our home had pertussis from the time DD was 2 weeks until she was 6 weeks old (btw the children who got pertussis were vax'd).  DD was fine...and still is fine.  She is breastfed and extremely healthy.  DD is now 6 months old and we have already traveled by air, been in airports, taken the city bus, walked through multiple malls, and spent time in a local elementary school (the exact school that has all the cases of pertussis).  I, personally, wouldn't allow a vaccination to keep me from traveling...BUT I am a non-vax mom.

[LauMa]

I second a recommendation for breastfeeding, in my opinion it is a stronger, better defence than vaccinations. And a good, natural, non-synthetic vit D supplement, as vit D is a highly under-rated in immune booster in adults I would imagine it would also prove effective in babies.