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Alpha is in the public school system and he is required, by state law, to have his immunizations.

I am writing about this topic today because he does not, by our choice, have all his immunizations. Nor will he have all the shots the state requires. So the school sent us a letter informing us that our child is not in compliance with state law and we needed to sign a waiver if we want him to stay in school.

I don’t know why they say he is required to have his immunizations since we can object to any or all of the shots. They should call them recommended, not required.

• “Required” would be non-negotiable, I would think.
• “Recommended” would be negotiable.

Since they are all negotiable, “recommended” makes sense.

I do have a theory as to why all the school forms say “required”. If the forms called them “recommended”, more parents might realize that all those shots are not needed. And then they might have more parents refusing some of the vaccinations. And then the authority of the government vaccination program might be questioned. And we can’t have that.

I filled out the form, indicating which vaccines we were waiving (whichever ones he didn’t have, that’s what we waived). Of course, the only ones he didn’t have were the ones we didn’t want him to have: polio and hepatitis B.

The interesting part was the claim on the waiver form.

I had read a website (it’s on the internet; therefore it must be true) that said to be careful what you sign on these waiver forms. If you acknowledge, in writing, putting your child at risk, that may be a “confession”. Now that may be a bit of a stretch, going from waiving a vaccine to having the state take your kids.

But why not err on the side of caution? What the website said to do was to modify the form to match your take on things.

I thought “Why not give it a shot? The worst that can happen is they’ll reject the form and send us another letter.” (pun not intended but quite clever if I do say so myself) So I found the part of the form that irked me and fixed it so I actually did agree with it. The part of the form that didn’t sit well with me was in bold on the form:

“By signing this waiver, you acknowledge that you are placing your child and others at risk of serious illness should he or she contract a disease that could have been prevented through proper vaccination.“

We decided against polio and hep. B because of the low risk. The entire Western Hemisphere of the world has been certified polio-free for the last 15 years. Hepatitis B is transmitted by morally-objectionable activities, none of which our kindergartner should even know about, much less be involved in. It’s the same objection many people have about Gardasil. If, later in life, Alpha wants to travel to India or work with blood, then he can get the polio or hep B vaccines. But until then, his risk is very low.

I felt that the form did not recognize that the risk of serious illness could be low and that it wasn’t really putting my child at risk. But the worst part about the form was that it claimed I would be putting other people at risk.

What?

Other people should not be at risk if my child is not vaccinated. They could be at risk for one of two reasons:

1. If vaccinated people are at risk for a disease because someone else wasn’t vaccinated, that means the vaccine is pretty much useless.
2. If the other people are not vaccinated, then it was their choice to be unvaccinated that put them at risk.

Neither case involves my child. I did not want to acknowledge something that did not make sense to me, so I altered the form.

Now it says

“By signing this waiver, you acknowledge that you are placing your child at low risk of serious illness should he or she contract a disease that could have been prevented through proper vaccination.”

I am no longer liable for other people’s illnesses. And I am not agreeing that my choice is risky. There, now I am more comfortable with it. All the school will do is file it away with my child’s permanent record. I think they don’t care what’s on the form as long as they have something to show the state.

What is the difference between vaccinations and immunizations anyway?

Lunch for Beta today consisted of macaroni and cheese, accompanied by a hot dog. It was an extra-nutritious lunch because I was in charge. Normally when my wife makes lunch she includes things like fruit and/or vegetables.

When I make hot dogs, I check with each child to see how he wants the hot dog served: normal, cut into little circles, or made into an octopus shape. I think they have each taken me up on the octopus offer only once. After they see that the octopus isn’t really much to behold, and it tastes the same anyway, they stick with just a plain hot dog.

But today, for some reason, Beta took the octopus option. So I got to serve my infamous hot-dogtopus.

It might be better if the octopus had 8 legs instead of 4, but my knife skillz aren’t that great. They are approximately halfway between dejected and upset – nowhere near mad. And if you do try this at home, you get bonus points if you taper the legs so that they look more like tentacles and less like stumps.

Come to think of it, the mouth isn’t representative either – but who wants to eat a hot dog with a beak in it? That’s a rhetorical question.

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On a somewhat-related note, Alpha is at school all day so he takes a lunch. I packed him a salami sandwich, some chips, string cheese, and 2 chocolate-chip cookies. He came home today with the following items in his lunch box: half a bag of chips, string cheese, and 2 chocolate-chip cookies. So all he ate was a sandwich and about 4 chips.

That is uncharacteristic of him – he is a very god eater. Lunch for him yesterday was 2 pieces of pizza. Besides, what elementary-school-aged child ignores chocolate-chip cookies?

Oh well, packing his next lunch should be easy. I’ll just make another sandwich and put it in the box with today’s leftovers. He didn’t say the food was bad – just that he wasn’t hungry.

My parents always have cats on their farm, and the variety of cats usually produces a good crop of kittens each year.

This year was no different and there was even a bonus: a heterochromiate (or is that heterochromian?). Having just watched a movie that had an antagonist whose main identifying mark was his eye color, I think that this cat would make the perfect sidekick.

Before I get started on today’s topic, I will digress on the title. I did cringe as I typed out those words; it took all I had (okay, maybe not all I had, but something at least) not to correct them to “I Have Eyes for Only You” or even “I Have Eyes for You Only”. But, as “I Only Have Eyes for You” is a common phrase, I thought it best to keep it as the title.

Let’s think through that phrase a little more. What does it mean? Is it “I Only”? If I am the only one who has eyes for you, then you must not be much to look at (errrr, at which to look).

Or what if “only” isn’t supposed to modify “I” – maybe “Only Have Eyes”? That means that only my eyes are for you – not my ears, not my arms, not anything else. That’s a lousy deal too.

Wait! Maybe “Only” is supposed to modify “Have”. That’s a curious case. That would imply what? that I never had eyes for you before? that my eyes are present-tense only? Scratch that – they probably meant something else.

It really is a poorly-worded phrase. That’s about the worst place they could have put the word “Only”.

Now on to what I originally wanted this post to contain…

When you’re looking for that perfect someone, consider the following, which will be of benefit to your future children.

Marry someone who has a prescription that’s the same as yours, but with the opposite polarity (near- or far-sighted). That way the near-sightedness and far-sightedness will cancel, and your kids will have great vision.

I’m sure you’d also have to factor astigmatism in there too, but I will leave that as an exercise for the reader.

We got our kids new toothbrushes a few weeks ago. It turns out that one of the toothbrushes has a new feature – a suction cup built into the end.

I thought it might have some practical use, but once a 5-year-old discovers what it can do,

your house

will never

be the same.

In cooperation with LaanyKidsMom, here are some entries for this week.

• Quotes
  Our oldest found out that ketchup does not go well with strawberries.
  I said “Ketchup goes well with french fries.”
  Response from the oldest: “Caramel goes on fries”
  And the 3YO chimed in with “And caramel goes on the road if you want it to be brown!”

  Yes, it could.

  What else has brought me joy this week?

• Driving Advice
  I have started getting driving advice from my kids, thanks in part to racing games on the Game Cube.

  “Go faster.”
  “Yeah, turn on rocket power!”
  To which I had to reply with “no, our minivan does not have rocket power.”

  One more

• You Know, That Thing…
  Another thing that made me smile was this conversation I overheard somewhere (park?, grocery store?):
  Parent: You move slower than molasses!
  Child: What’s molasses?
  Parent: Something that … moves slowly.

We had been meaning to make ice cream with the boys all summer, but summer was too busy (or too lazy, take your pick) so we never did that. They did manage to make ice cream with their grandmother, but that was during the day while I was at work, so I didn’t get any of it.

Now that it is the day after Labor Day and school has started, we finally made ice cream at our house. The recipe that we used calls for zip-type plastic baggies, a cheap substitute for the near-indestructible wood and metal ice cream maker that my parents used when I was a kid.

For those not familiar with the plastic-bag method: pour the ingredients into a small plastic bag and seal it, put ice and salt and the small plastic bag into a large plastic bag and seal it, then shake/roll/toss the large plastic bag for several minutes. Here is a picture of the first step.

Apparently, it went fine the first time the kids tried it, at their grandmother’s house. Today, I got to try it with them here, after dinner (“you kids want dessert? Okay, but you have to make it yourselves.”)

Our recipe didn’t say anything about double-bagging the ice cream mixture. I highly recommend using two bags for the ice cream and two bags for the brine solution.

“Why?” you ask.

One reason is that we inadvertently got the extra-pointy ice from our freezer. A couple minutes into the last step, I noticed that the salt/ice mixture was turning brown. I was making chocolate ice cream, and I expected the chocolate to stay in the ice cream. The zip fastener was sealed (I checked), so I just kept going and hoped that the salt wasn’t leaking into the ice cream.

Another reason is that the table was getting wet while I was trying to get the ice cream to freeze. At first it was no big deal – I figured it was just condensation. But the other bag didn’t have that problem. My wife held up the bag and we watched it drip, drip, drip. We double-bagged the whole thing and didn’t have any more problems.

Just double-bag everything beforehand. Or pay extra for the high-quality dull ice. Or just use an old-school, industrial-strength ice cream machine.

One more thing – rinse off the ice cream baggies after you take them out of the brine. The middle child made it about halfway through his ice cream and then was done eating. I hated to see ice cream go to waste, so I started eating it. I took 3 bites, and 2 of them had a granule of salt. Biting into a chunk of salt is not good when you’re expecting strawberry ice cream flavor. I don’t know that biting into a chunk of salt is a good idea any other time either.

Double bagging may help with keeping the salt off the inner bag, but I’d still recommend rinsing off the ice cream bag. Hint: use cold water, otherwise you’ll undo all the work that it took to make the ice cream.