Shots...YIKES!

On Friday, March 20, 2009 our family had to go to Atlanta to have our official immigration physicals. Yes, we had to drive 3 hours just to go to the doctor! If you go to your own local doctor for this physical then that doctor has to jump through many hoops to prove that they are "certified", including obtaining an Apostille on their license! CRAZY! At least Atlanta was only 3 hours away. Stig had already gone to Atlanta in February for his physical, but he decided to accompany the girls and I to ours. I was told by the receptionist on the phone to bring our vaccine records with us, well that was easy to obtain for the girls, but of course I didn't have my own records. So, I called my former childhood pediatrician in Indianapolis only to be told that my records were so "old" that they probably not longer had them on file. OUCH!!! Just what you want to hear the month before you turn 40! Anyway, she did suggest that perhaps my high school would have the records on file and they did. I was really hoping that this would prevent me from having a bunch of shots. We arrived at the "certified" doctors office and a very nice nurse started helping us, she had us start filling out forms, which I gladly handed over to Stig while she and I looked over the vaccination records. She started listing the shots that Elena would need and myself. Oh my goodness Elena HATES shots, I was not looking forward to this. As we were talking and she went to copy our passports, she realized that we were ALREADY US citizens! Uh, yeah. "Well, that changes everything, if you are not immigrating to the US, but to Belgium then you don't need ANY shots!" We also did not need to fill out all of those forms that Stig was so diligently taking care of. Turns out that all we needed was a TB test. That didn't exactly make anyone happy since it still meant that we were going to get poked with a needle. While watching Elena and Adriana get nervous about it, Isabella started getting upset so, I sent her to the waiting room to retrieve daddy to hold her for her test. She was so cute running out there saying, "daddy, come hold me for my shot". I thought Elena was going to hyperventilate trying to breath and cough to avoid the pain of the needle, Adriana just took it all in stride and Isabella cried.:( The good news was that our appointment did not take very long, so they won a trip to the Atlanta American Girl Store. All was right in their world once they received that joyous news. The big girls both paid to have their Just Like You Dolls ears pierced and then mommy and daddy surprised them with a new Chrissa DVD and the Sweetheart skirt outfit to share. Then we hit traffic and had about a 4 hour trip home.