As parents, and especially as stay-at-home mothers, we eagerly look forward to the day we send our babies off to school. But the one thing that always nags at the back of our minds is the preparation for a sick child. It is common knowledge that when kids start nursery or daycare, they will almost always get sick.
Nursery schools and first learning institutions are a haven for mothers and young children. They provide our children with their first social circles outside of the home. They are great at teaching order and discipline to the kids. They are also a mother’s dream as she drops off her child in a safe and nurturing environment, giving the mother a much-needed break to attend to other matters.
But what we don't realise at first is that these centres are a breeding ground for every kind of imaginable viral infections. Kids are infecting each other, teachers are carriers of various pathogens from their own children, ultimately no one is safe from infections and re-infections. Including the innocent parties at home. Mothers, fathers and other children in the home are bound to be infected by their sick schoolchild and end up just as sick.
This was the case in our home and daycare centre this week. On Monday night, the caregiver texted to say she was ill and wouldn't be taking care of the kids that week. Coincidentally, I had gone about my Monday in the healthiest of spirits. By the afternoon, I was coughing up a storm, my mouth was producing sputum at an alarming rate and my body was crashing as a result of the constant infections. I had been to the doctor's office with the same symptoms just three weeks prior.
That same Monday, my son, who was on the mend from the flu, started producing a lot of gooey, yellow snot. It was so sudden and caught us completely off guard that my husband and I had decided to keep him home shortly before the daycare lady texted. I couldn't help but think that this was not a coincidence. We all had the same virus and it had been silently attacking us until it exposed itself in all of us at the exact same time!
The whole week was spent going to doctors' offices, taking medicines and traditional concoctions and recuperating. I couldn't help but wonder at the cycle of it all. The kids get sick, then the parents get sick, then their teachers, then their teachers’ children, then the children’s friends, and so on the cycle goes until we come back full circle once more.
In the last two months, I have gotten sick more times than I care to remember. My son has had all kinds of runny noses and coughs, and the daycare lady has cancelled several days due to her or her family being sick. As December rolls in and the days get colder, the snow falls and cold winds rise, we are likely to get sick again before too long.
