What Are Your Best Survival Strategies for Parenting While Sick?

A single of the hardest sections about staying a father or mother is parenting even though unwell. Not like work, wherever, at least in theory, you can acquire a working day off to relaxation and recover, parenting is a spherical-the-clock work, the place you are the back again-up solution, illnesses be damned. Include in the gazillion illnesses your kids carry home to you from daycare, and parenting turns into a nonstop blur of keeping your young ones alive though also surviving the newest horrible virus.

The very first important sickness my son brought dwelling was RSV. He had a mild temperature for about a working day, only to quickly bounce again, when my possess infection turned into bronchitis. For the subsequent few days, as my son cruised close to the residence in his Infant Shark costume (it also happened to be Halloween), I invested my time on the sofa, coughing up a storm, hoping to hold it collectively ample until my partner obtained home and could just take in excess of.

My son’s diaper stayed soggy longer than it need to have, his bottle came only immediately after he begun yelling, and 1 of my big methods for retaining in a single piece was sticking him in a toddler bouncer, which occupied him for all of fifteen minutes right before he commenced crying once more.

A few months later, my son got the flu and promptly gave it to me—only this time, my spouse was out of town on a do the job vacation. Just as ahead of, my son bounced back again speedily, leaving me in the lurch to care for him although ill, feverish night time feedings and all. I continue to simply cannot pretty recall just how I dealt with that, but we are both of those nevertheless alive and in a single piece.

This has been a pattern really considerably all through the entirety of my parenting journey—my kid has provided me strep, stomach bugs, bronchitis, and the flu more situations than I can rely. For the most recent installment of parenting while sick, we all got COVID-19. For a 7 days, my spouse and I laid on the couch, scarcely in a position to transfer, even though my son, who was mildly ill for about a working day, destroyed the residence. Sometime, I’ll clear away the past of the marker scribblings from the walls, but until eventually then, it’ll stand as a memorial to survival.

Because I’m bound to deal with this all over again in the pretty much-absolutely not-so-distant future—and I know I’m not the only one—I occur to you for advice. What are your methods, ideas, and tricks for parenting though sick? Veteran mom and dad, go away a comment down below to enable me and other dad and mom of smaller youngsters to far better survive these periods. We’ll round them up to share in a long term put up.