So recently we’ve had quite the spate of illness in the household. Now usually we’re great, not getting much and no one suffers from the dreaded allergies (hayfever) but the lergy has just been going around and around! I was managing to fight it off while looking after the kids. For a while, there were more days off school than on.Now after a while that gets hard because as we ALL know kids get miraculously better around 10-10:30 when it’s too late to send them packing off to school!
So the days were spent catering to every need and watching tv and getting hot chips for lunch (cos that’s what I got when I was a kid)… I would think to myself.. great they’re getting better I’ll have my time back tomorrow …. but by around 4pm it would all start to come crashing down around me and I would see that tomorrow was gonna be lost too. I swear by the third week of one or the other kid being home tues-thurs, I was DONE. And it was showing… I walked into school one morning with a child trying to stay home ( I’m of the opinion it’s better to try and go and come home then to just stay home. I guess it comes from my old work days when you needed to prove you were sick by showing up and being sent home). A teacher even stopped me and made a comment about D being sick and that it was obviously stressing me out!
It was also getting to a point with Grand Master D that it was feeling normal for him to stay home and I could see I needed to seize on that teaching moment about work ethic and sucking it up and getting on with it. I could see he was sick but really not sick enough to be home for days on end. There must be something else going on. Stress from the pressure the kids are put under these days at school is crazy. The system has become so broken that the powers that be think that the only way to fix the problem is to make things more difficult for the kids. I’ll go into details another time but for now I just needed to get this kid back to school.
It was nothing more serious than a bit of a cold which I was treating with all manner of home remedies, you know apple cider vinegar for a cough and flegmy chest, lemon juice, ginger, garlic and manuka honey with echinacea for the vitamins and immune building. Bicarb soda in water 3 x a day works too! I know what you’re saying, just go to the doctor and get something…. but we all know that doctors can’t treat the common cold beyond anything we can do at home and short of having a full on respiratory infection in need of antibiotics what would they do??? In the end I just sent him off to school and the first day was rough and then he was just fine. Whatever was bothering him sorted itself out and he got back to his happy self.
It always so hard when your kids are sick. You want to do what’s best but that is not always the easiest thing to know how. I have been really getting into natural remedies for things. I find it fascinating that nature can provide so many remedies. I will continue to learn and share things I find.
Oho I think I’m going hippie 🙂
Comments 4
AWW Mols, I am a bit tougher than you, I send em off unless they are puking, infectiuos, missing a limb or otherwise incapacitated. If i get a call from school it’s always little princess Caity, last time she had a headache because the relief teacher could not keep the class quiet! Seriously i was not impressed, I spoke to the “relief teacher” who i reckon was just about to get a letter from the Queen, I had to almost yell, stone motherless deaf, no idea the kids were all going berserk, i reckon she struggled to see the back of the classroom. They called her a relief teacher, i said to Jo, I reckon she probably taught my Mother (70). So after a few minutes of chatting,(sic YELLING) I thought Caity would be better off at home!! lmao
I could have been barfing at 8am but as long as it wasn’t “right” when I had to catch the bus, I was out the door!
I had Mono in grade 12, which meant I got to stay home for nearly a month – that was bloody fantastic — and there wasn’t anything my mom could do or say. Baha
Also, apple cider vinegar is foul. I was instructed to take it for some kind of remedy (totally can’t remember) but I couldn’t get passed the smell.
My kids need to have a noticeable fever or vomiting to be kept home from school. And I”m with you on the doctor – I don’t need to take my kids in for a cold. They’re more likely to catch something worse in the waiting room, anyway!
I tend to agree. It’s easier to teach them to tough it out with a boo boo than coddle them for every little sniffle. They’ll thank you for it when they’re adults. Maybe. I’m just now getting around to it. Ha!