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...