Getting a Jump on Sick Days

Whether you work at home or out in the big world, when your kid is sick, your life stops.  Sometimes the hardest part about having your kid home sick is figuring out what they can do to keep themselves occupied. True, being sick is not supposed to be a day of fun and games, however, unless they’re sleeping all afternoon, you can bet they’ll look to you to cure their inevitable boredom.

To be prepared for sick days it’s wise to have two specific things in your arsenal; a craft bin and a game bin that only come out when your child is sick.  If these bins contain treasures they’ve never played with before, hopefully they’ll be new and exciting enough to hold your kid’s interest long enough for you to at least throw in a load of laundry and make some phone calls.

You never know when your kids will be ill, so filling your sick day bins should be an ongoing process.  Therefore, when you see a cool game at a garage sale, or you find toys at a closeout, or you run across art supplies on special, snap them up and squirrel them away in your sick day bins.  Even if you clean out your kids’ closet and find toys or games they never play with anymore (because they’ve forgotten about them), hide them away in your sick day bins.  Or if you have friends who are getting rid of toys their older kids have outgrown, acquire them for your sick day bins.  And on those birthdays or Christmases where the relatives buy so much for your kids they can’t keep it all straight, discretely procure some of it to pull out on those days they’re not feeling well.

A sick day craft bin is even easier to create and maintain because you can throw junk from around the house into it.  Things like empty paper towel or toilet paper rolls, oatmeal boxes, jelly jars, fabric scraps, ribbon, old magazines, unusual small boxes, and an empty egg carton can all go from trash to treasure with the help of a child’s imagination.  Of course, you’ll also need to stock it with some store-bought items, such as scissors, a glue stick, markers, as well as some optional items like pipe cleaners, felt squares and construction paper.  The more you put in it, the more interest your child will have in exploring it.  You can even create games around your sick day craft bin.  Write down locations (i.e. the beach, Disneyland, even the surface of the moon) on slips of paper and put them in a paper bag.  Have your child draw from the bag, and whatever location he or she gets they must recreate it using the contents of the sick day craft bin.  They can cut images out of magazines and glue them on paper, build a diorama, make pipe cleaner puppets, or create anything the location inspires.  (This is why it’s important to have lots of doodads in your sick day craft box.)

However, if your child feels too ill to even color, there’s nothing wrong with putting them in front of the TV with a movie or the Nickelodeon channel.  Granted, a steady diet of TV is not healthy, but just like giving a child 7-Up for a sore throat, TV sooths a child into resting without being bored.  If you’re lucky it will lull them to sleep.

Or you can always read to your child, which you probably do anyway at bedtime, however getting in some extra pages in the middle of the day can really lift a sick child’s spirits.  If you’re in for the long haul (with chicken pox or strep throat, for example) you might pick up a chapter book at the library that you’ll both enjoy.

Having a sick child is never fun, but at some point your child will have to stay home from school due to illness.  However it doesn’t have to feel like an incarceration for either one of you.  With a little planning, you’ll be ready to combat not only those cold and flu bugs, but those pesky boredom blues as well. 

Stacy Dymalski is a freelance writer, filmmaker, and stand-up comic. Her screen credits include co-writer (with Zack Van Eyck)/director of the feature film "Jupiter Landing" and writer/director of the web sitcom series "Hagnet."  Stacy learned about being a parent the hard way: she became one. A working mom, Stacy finds the humorous lessons in family life and then writes about them in magazines and books (much to the annoyance of her two sons).  Stacy recently co-authored 'The Vixen Chronicles' with Brandy Pinkerman: