I didn’t realise people were still replying to this.
Firstly:
I stand by my original comment, which I see you had deleted, so not ridiculous at all. To me it's part of having a childs costs.
I didn’t have anything deleted, I didn’t report your post, so someone else (at least one) must clearly have thought it was out of line.
Fine, you didn’t have £60k cash. You clearly had £60k worth of assets at least. Do you think people should only have children if they own property and have a lot of assets?
We were cautious and made sure we had enough money for a child before we had one. We didn’t expect to have two at once and we definitely didn’t expect for them both to have disabilities which would take up all of my time and prevent me from going back to work, at least until they’re at school (and probably not even then unless I can do something very flexible - I’m working on that now).
I don’t have a single mum friend in real life who has paid for the chicken pox vaccination, especially those with twins. A few people in my twin group have, usually after seeing how much of an issue it has caused for other twin parents. Over the last three months every other kid at nursery has come down with it, clearly none were vaccinated and there’s been plenty of time to do it. Certainly where I live it’s not common, which is why I haven’t been able to arrange a vaccination for the other twin since DT1 came down with it - there are two places that offer it and the earliest appointment was next Friday, I’ll be amazed if he doesn’t have it by then.
As I said, I’d planned to do it once DT1’s DLA came through, which typically happened on the very day he first came out with spots.
DT2 was off on Monday but went to nursery on Thursday and Friday this week as he still has no signs of the virus, as agreed with the nursery who said there was no point keeping him off unless he was clearly unwell, especially as it has been present in the nursery for months now.
DT1 has been really unwell with it and has an infection. We had to take him to the doctors and we kept him outside until called in then took his straight to the room and straight home. Didn’t take him into the pharmacy. Haven’t taken him outside apart from the appointment for over a week now. DH has worked from home and I have rescheduled meetings from my very part time job. We are not taking it lightly in the least.
It does seem like DT2 didn’t pick it up at the same time as DT1 so likelihood is he will have caught it from him, which means another week or two until he develops the spots. Any sign of illness at all and I’ll keep him off nursery just to be safe.
If the kids are in nursery and not vaccinated then I'd presume their parents want them to catch chickenpox asap
I don’t think this is necessarily true - like I say, I don’t know anyone locally who’s paid to vaccinate against it, I don’t think they particularly want their kids to get it, they just accept that they will. I think there’s a general feeling that if it were important to vaccinate then the NHS would do it, even though the reality is more complex than that obviously.
If I could go back I’d make different choices, but here we are.