Days on my practicum actually in a school = 6, days taken off to look after my sick child who got sick attending the same school = 3, so far…

Days off sick from school seem to cause grown ups to believe two different things:

1) how dare they send their sick child to school to infect others

2) they let their kid stay home for the smallest wee sniffle they should stop being manipulated by their child/ren… or some similar variation on harden up.

I have been thinking about the difficulties of employing women. You can not ask if anyone has children at an interview so I can totally understand assuming, then once the assumption has been made you also have to assume the children get sick. You can’t ask their marital status to see if there are others who can take on the lesser task of looking after the sick children so mum can go to work where people other than their child depend on them. I can understand why lots of women effectively hide their children. Let’s not forget how annoying sick children are either.. it’s not fun.

Why do we make it so hard, so full of judgement…

Having said all that Helena and I had the best day on her first sick day – the your face is a tap day… Helena talked about the school whiteboard and how she liked that she knew the schedule so she wrote us one…

It was fun. We weren’t at home so there weren’t jobs to do. We did do a bit of puzzle. I worked a bit… she watched movies, but less than she would have if we didn’t have a schedule. It was companionable and forced us to spend time together.

The second day she cried because she couldn’t go to school and she’s starting to cough. We had movies and I finished the puzzle..

and we played lots of Cranium. It was fun.

Day three and she’s got a hacking cough so we pack and go home. I try to explain that part and parcel of school is getting sick because that’s what happens when lots of people are together. We had lots of conversations about Covid, how viruses work, and being responsible with our germs. Helena so rarely gets sick.. I am impressed with her mostly good humor even though she does feel cheated about missing school.