13 Comments
Apr 19, 2021Liked by Katelyn Jetelina

Great post of actual real-world ways. Thank you!! Cautious but not neurotic and lots of connections to the soul... very healthy!!!

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Apr 19, 2021Liked by Katelyn Jetelina

This is great - thank you so much (for this and all your posts!). My kids are older than yours - 10 and 16 - in good health, and the older one just got his first shot. Yay! Still... there's the younger one. Both kids are great about mask-wearing, but still... there are all the other people. And so we're contemplating the traditional July 4th trip to visit my husband's family, whom we haven't seen since Christmas 2019, and I think we'll go ahead and do it because everyone in the family 16+ will be fully vaccinated by then, but we will still have all the worries you've expressed. (Aside from getting the kids to wear their masks. And nobody asks to hold them - heh. ;-) And they don't *usually* eat off the floor in public anymore...) We'll be flying. My husband is a physicist, so of course he calculated the relative risks of getting covid while wearing a mask on an airplane vs. dying in a car accident on a round trip from south central Indiana to coastal Massachusetts, and airplane + mask won. Hopefully that result is still valid in July.

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Apr 20, 2021Liked by Katelyn Jetelina

Hey there, thank you for this thoughtful post! Follow up question, I know your littles are little, but for those of us with kids in the 12-15 soon to be approved for ER use by FDA, I would love your opinion about vaccine safety for that age group. If your littles were old enough, would you get them vaccinated? Why or why not?

Thanks :)

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Apr 20, 2021Liked by Katelyn Jetelina

Katelyn, It sounds like your parenting style and ours have overlapped a lot with the exception of daycare and flying. We live in Florida. Sadly, hardly anyone masks here so we still have our 9 year old doing distance school and our 17 month old at home.

We would possibly consider letting our oldest return to school but the school doesnt enforce masking, and puts all the children together in one small crowded cafeteria for lunch. We dont feel that is safe at all.

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Apr 19, 2021Liked by Katelyn Jetelina

Thank you for sharing! So helpful!

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founding

Thank you! My 22 year old son has been SUPER cooperative for the last year while living at home (sent home his senior year of college due to the pandemic). All of us will be fully vaccinated by May 1. He wants to visit friends in Chicago, but is sensitive to then coming back home and posing any risk to us. (We are healthy 60+ year old parents.) We are confused by the many recommendations for eating in restaurants, going to bars, etc. What are your thoughts about a trip to see old friends in Chicago for a weekend and then returning to live with three other adults?

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I love this post so much. THANK YOU for sharing with us what your own personal decisions look like with your own family because so many of us put a heck of a lot of trust in you and are always second guessing ourselves as parents. Parenting during a pandemic is HARD but your transparency and gentle guidance has made this so much easier to navigate. Thank you for all you do, Dr. Jetelina!

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So helpful- any information on younger teens. We have a 14 year old and a 16 year old. 16 year old has one vaccine in and my husband and I are vaccinated. We really want to protect our son. We wear masks- he does play baseball but he wears gaiter with a filter. We have had no other gatherings other than school, and baseball. What can we safely do this summer?

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I'm curious about the young infants being high risk part-- I'd heard that young babies rarely get sick at all with covid, is that wrong?

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