My younger son has been sick all week. Croup. The middle-of-the-night sound of him hoarsely fighting for breath wakes one instantly to a state of full alert. We've been down this road seven times now (Down syndrome awarded him tiny respiratory passages that are overly susceptible to infection), so it, like everything else, was weathered with only a modicum of whining.
On my part, the whining. But my point: he brought this home from school (no one else in the house is sick), and therein lies my quandary. When do you keep a sick kid home and when do you send him off to school?
I can count on several fingers, toes, and other appendages how many things I culd have/would have accomplished this week had Eric been well enough to attend school. Lost work, lost sleep, lost sanity. Not that I haven't cherished every second with a boy who yells "No!" to every suggestion, but hello, I could have done a whole lot of things that I didn't. It goes without saying, and when a single-parent-who-worked-outside-of-the-home it was even worse. At least I can sit here and chat with you on my laptop, which is more than a lot of parents are abe to do when wth a sick child.
But when do you keep your kids home? And do some of us fudge a bit and send our kids to school when maybe we shouldn't?
I know as a kid I had to be at death's door to stay home, so that happened very seldom. I tend to err on the other side as a parent, though, since I'm home anyway. Not every parent has that luxury (??), but when my kids seem too uncomforable to sit at a desk all day or seem contagious, they stay home. No matter what. So I was surprised to read this list of keeping-sick-kids-home criteria that says it's okay to send kids with colds to school.
Ummm..hello? It is? I'm pretty sure it's an upper respiratory infection that's kept my kid home all week. I know kids have perpetual runny noses all wnter long, but...where do you draw the line? When is it a cold that will infect the class and when is it just...a cold?
I was hoping for something more definitive here, but it seems that except for the obvious (fevers, typhoid, TB, Hep B, etc) and the other obvious (vomiting, diarrhea, blah blah blah), there's a huge gray area between please-let-my-kid-be-well-enough-to-go-to-school and oh-fuck-another-personal-day-at-work-gone.
So where do you draw the line? When and for what do you say, "Should they stay or should they go?"
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