How do you make your child comfortable and cheer him up when he’s home sick from school? I’ve heard all sorts of solutions from a “sick day box” with special toys and treats inside to making the living room into sort of a sick-day wonderland of blanket forts, comfy nests and TV trays.
Then there is the other school of thought: If you’re too sick to go to school, you’re too sick to do anything else. Some parents have their child stay put in bed, with, of course, care for their sickness, but little in way of amusements.
I can see the benefits of both ways to treat a sick day. On the one hand, you don’t want to make a sick day so fun that your child begins to feel “ill” so he can stay home with the sick box and the blanket forts, but on the other, you do want to ease his suffering and help him feel loved and comforted.
As a veteran of many days home with sick kids, I’ve found something that seems to work, and as a bonus, also eases the stress I feel of taking a whole day off and “getting nothing done.” Of course mothering is getting something done in the most profound sense, but any busy mother knows the feeling I’m talking about.
The idea is this: Pick a quiet project that you’ve been meaning to do that could also involve your child. For example, sorting that box of photos, working on scrapbook pages, sorting and filing your paper, or anything that doesn’t involve much physical activity is good. Set up a workspace next to the couch or wherever your child is going to be resting for the day. Have your child help you sort or whatever he feels up to doing. Even if he is too sick to help, or dozes off, just being there next to you all day is going to be a real treat.
One time when I did this, I was home with my daughter because she had a case of diarrhea. The really bad thing was that it was a weekend, and that morning we were all going with extended family to cut down a Christmas tree. She was disappointed, to say the least. I got out a box of photos I’d been meaning to sort, and I was able to relieve her sadness, if not her illness, by telling her stories about what was going on in the pictures, and letting her help me decide how to put them in the album.
At the end of the day, the others had come home from the Christmas tree outing, but we all had new, warm memories to share.