Grandparents

TITER MADNESS: With A New Baby On The Way, The Best Gift You Can Give Is A Shot

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By Elissa Caterfino Mandel

My youngest son calls me searching for titer guidance. He’s not sure about the blood tests or vaccines he should be getting, so he can be cleared to see his new niece. Who is this person? On one hand, he is the former teenager I once had to lobby — no, plead with — to get a flu shot. But now, he is a 25-year-old with an unhealthy fixation about CDC vaccination sites.

Some people assume the only thing families have to do to get ready for a new baby is set up a crib and a car seat. For the extended expectant family, that’s not true, at least not anymore. Rather than gifts, we have to bring injected versions of ourselves when we meet the new baby — or bloodwork that shows we have titers aka immunity. This is not as easy as it sounds. My youngest son doesn’t even have an internist.

Luckily, my son should be fine with his 1994 measles inoculation; he was not born on the cusp of vaccine chaos the way I was. As a 1961 baby, I recently learned the MMR vaccine I got was probably subpar. Oh, goody. The next thing I’ll find out is that my high school diploma was also a fake.

It’s strange I’m in the role of vaccine arbiter, given that I usually slip up and refer to the MMR as the MMRI.

While my son ekes out a pass on the MMR, he does need a Tdap booster, an inoculation against whooping cough. I also tell him to confirm that the chicken pox vaccine he got at around age five is still protective. The parents to be haven’t mentioned a particular fear of chicken pox. But I figure I might as well use my son’s new openness to shots to satisfy my own curiosity.

It’s true, I’m not having a baby. But as I compile my family vaccination statistics, I feel like I’m on the front lines of parenthood again. Three of my four boys are good. My parents are covered. My husband and I have a plan. The one outlier is the family dog.

I did not lobby for the position of vaccine enforcer, but I can appreciate the impulse behind wanting a healthy child. Twenty nine years ago, I remember calling my own mother- in-law to ask if anyone in her family had diabetes. I’m not sure what moved me to ask such a stupid question, which was more like an accusation.

And what was my poor mother-in-law supposed to do if someone did have diabetes? It’s not as if I were going to rescind my entire pregnancy because of a misguided fear of some inherited condition. Yes, your son impregnated me, but you know what? I don’t really want any of your genetic material. I was an anxious pain in the ass.

And this is a much scarier time in the childhood disease world than 1990 was. I don’t mind getting shots. Bring them on. It’s the least I can do to make sure my new grandchild is safe.

There is an impulse when you’re about to deliver a baby to not want a nasty thing like the world to impinge upon the experience. I remember that feeling. But my kids are almost all in their 30s now. They’re good people, willing to take time out of their lives to get the vaccinations they need to meet our family’s newest member. In retrospect, I’m pretty glad the world has done whatever it did.

TEN GEMS AND A GENIUS: How To Turn A Preschooler Into A Student of STEM

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By Elissa Caterfino Mandel

Of the four grandparents my granddaughter has, I would probably be the one voted least likely to succeed at fostering a love of STEM. I’ve never encountered a jigsaw puzzle I haven’t run from. And even in my watered-down college bio classes, I never could understand alleles. For me to sell my granddaughter on the benefits of STEM is like asking a pig to teach mah jongg.

Two Tuesdays ago, I took my granddaughter to Genius Gems, where there were no actual gems and, as far as I could tell, only one genius ( of course I mean my granddaughter). It was pouring and I was desperate. She’d already had a manicure.

Lucky for me, Genius Gems is advertised as an incubator for STEM with coding classes for kids ages 2-12.  It sounded like a pretty big step up from Chuck E Cheese where my kids spent way too much of their toddlerhood.  I imagined simulated circuit boards and places for kids of all ages to insert colorful pegs into holes, kind of like a communal game of Lite Brite fueled by math and engineering. It never occurred to me I’d have to help.

It was school vacation week and the place was overrun with toddlers, elementary school kids and moms and dads with babies on their hips. Almost everyone in there could have been my child, except for the 60 or so that could have been my grandchild.

The grandchild I did have was somewhat puzzled about what we were supposed to do.

“See those giant towers those big kids are making? They actually represent things in science,” I said to my granddaughter. “Things like electrons and neutrons and protons .”  Wow, Grandma. Good try. Incidentally I didn’t know if any of this was true. But it sounded good.

Luckily, my granddaughter wasn’t looking for a science teacher but instead more of a hunting and gathering companion. The tower she built never got off the floor. She wanted to collect every purple diamond shape in the immediate vicinity. It was like hunting for truffles.

Not surprisingly, her structure didn’t end up looking anything like the pictures on the instruction cards we had. And unfortunately I was no help. I’m more Flintstone and Rubble than Watson and Crick.

Undeterred by our building debacle, my granddaughter abandoned science in favor of art. At the craft table, she started to make a school banner based on the Harry Potter books. Harry Potter was a clearly a stretch for a 3-year-old. My granddaughter doesn’t even know who Bugs Bunny is.

But seeing how engaged she was, I was ready to declare Genius Gems a success. But then came an unfortunate blip.

My granddaughter was undone by a facsimile of the sorting hat from Harry Potter. Every art room of toddlers and young elementary school kids needs a sorting hat —  apparently that’s the only way to make sure they’re sufficiently spooked when they cut and paste.

Even I was a little scared of the sorting hat. In its slithery disgustingness, it was just tall enough to make a 3-year-old and a 57-year-old squirm, especially when it  began to talk.  It issued its proclamations in a deep, raspy voice, like something that had just come back from the crypt. In the Harry Potter books, the sorting hat organizes kids like Harry and Hermione and Rupert into schools. Here it was just driving kids out of the art room.

“Grandma,” my granddaughter said. “Make that hat go away.” Indeed.

Hoping no one was watching, I took the stupid sorting hat and hid it as far away from the craft table as I possibly could — behind the used glue containers and dried up paint.

Was this STEM? No way.

But while I may be no science teacher, my granddaughter now knows something important about me. I’m a helluva good hat thief.