This week, one mil­lion kids aged 6 months to 4 years are get­ting vac­ci­nated against the H1N1 virus/swine flu/‘mexican flu’ in the Nether­lands. I believe the Nether­lands is pretty late in get­ting this done: Swe­den for instance is much fur­ther in the vac­ci­na­tion pro­gramme. Usu­ally one would of course say bet­ter late than never, but as Eleonore already had the flu last week (and served me quite a Mom­pre­neur challenge/juggling act), I would rather say this one comes a lit­tle bit late for us.

In good Dutch order, it is not oblig­a­tory to have your kid vac­ci­nated, you may as a par­ent choose. I must admit I had sec­ond thoughts — not about the vac­cine itself, as I know many do, because I belong to the group who trust it is a wise thing to get vaccinated.

But I did have my sec­ond thoughts about sit­ting in the the assum­ingly mega-long queues to get the injec­tion, that I imag­ined undoubt­edly would have to be part of an oper­a­tion involv­ing vac­ci­na­tion of 1 mil­lion kids in 1 week. I mean, 1 mil­lion in one sin­gle week  — how could it otherwise??

But again, also in good Dutch order, if you choose to go along with the gov­ern­ment, you will be well taken care of. You bet­ter also do what they say, and exactly what they say: you bet­ter show up on the exact day, place and time allo­cated; indi­cated within a half hour slot, lest you go with­out. No sec­ond chance at your fam­ily doc­tors. The invi­ta­tion let­ter we got con­tained a full page of instruc­tions in tiny let­ters, where each postal code area was sorted on even and uneven house­num­bers — this was the way to trace ‘your’ slot. Be there or be square.

And — did it work or did it work! I think there were more per­son­nel than (ner­vous) kids and (even more ner­vous) par­ents at the large tent that had been put up in the Zuider­park in The Hague, which was our place to go to to get the injec­tion. Within less than 15 min­utes, we had parked, entered, reg­is­tered, found a nurse, sat through the painful sting, got­ten the reward (a col­or­ing pic­ture, suit­ably involv­ing a dinosaur and giant injec­tion nee­dle and lots of band aids — I assume to de-traumatise all the lit­tle ones by let­ting them colour it what­ever color after­wards),  and were out the door again. In fact — noth­ing but smiles all around, from all the staff, and mirac­u­lously (almost) from the kids, who seemed to sur­vive the expe­ri­ence just fine. Well done Holland.

And if you won­der — Eleonore did GREAT! She was so brave, I’m of course very proud ;-) But she did paint her dinosaur blue after­wards, and she did fill the injec­tion nee­dle next to him with imag­i­nary bright red blood, so I assume it was more scary than she wanted to show… !

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