This solid, red angriness wraps around her arm. The hives seem to have ceased, though, and the reaction is now remaining local.

Ugh.

Yesterday Piper and Chloe got DTaP shots. Both girls have had the HiB series and now are completing the DTaP series (with Chloe to get a booster at 5). Chloe did alright with these, except for a really gnarly knot in her leg after the last DTaP does she received that lasted over a month and was over 8 cms in diameter. This time, I'm not noticing anything particularly nasty, though. Thankfully.

This time, Piper developed immediate hives, and is continuing with them today - though, thankfully, she never developed any respiratory symptoms. Her arm is also quite swollen, and she's complaining of a lot of pain there. So I'm keeping her home and dosing her with benadryl through the day today. She also was the one who had a reaction to her last dose of the Hib vaccine.

I looked up the vaccine ingredients online to see if there was anything different from what I remembered... so far the most likely culprits would be the formaldehyde, or the latex stopper. Of course it could be anything in there. I didn't find any animal or food-related ingredients, which I have found in some of them, which would have been my knee-jerk assumption to what she would have reacted to.

The one ingredient that has me shaking my head (moreso than the formaldehyde, which alone is pretty gross) is the 2-phenoxyethanol. Ether. Lovely stuff. Toxic. Comes with huge warnings. Yet I just allowed my kids to have it shot into their bodies. What a good mom I am. It is also found in perfumes, bug repellent, dyes and inks. Weird...