Tips For Squashing The Bug & Entertaining Your Kid At The Same Time
What’s a parent to do to keep a kid’s boredom away during recovery time? Here are some great tips I found that I wanted to share with you:
- Create a fort, pirate cave, or tent with your child in the living room using lots of pillows, sheets, and blankets. Tuck in a sleeping bag and flashlight. If your kid feels well enough, let him wear his favorite costume or cape, and then either play a game, read an adventure book, put together a puzzle, or watch your favorite movie together.
- Create a stash of sick day boredom-beater activities for a kid who is not feeling terribly bad but must be contained in the home due to a contagious illness or is on health watch. Items can include easy craft projects, puzzles, lego kits, paper dolls, marker or coloring projects (tuck in a new pack–that’s always sure to bring a smile), and other simple and inexpensive items. Be sure, however, not to plan the idea in a kid’s mind that it is so “fun” to be sick that it could encourage a case of the “pretends” in the future.
- Purchase some inexpensive tub toys just for sick times. It’s always refreshing and sometimes necessary to take a bath, especially when feverish, and slightly-ill children will enjoy having a new tub friend to share the experience with.
- Tell your child of special treatments on sick days. Parents have shared special times: all-you-can applesauce, new PJs once well, polishing a child’s hands and toes, letting the sick child have a temporary bed on the floor in the parents room with lots of snuggly blankets and pillow, or getting to watch a new movie together.
