I am a SAHM and have gone out of my way to avoid getting my kids sick. In fact, my first child was over two before she ever got more than a little cold. But I was always told that the first year they start school they get sick a lot.

Well, my oldest child started preschool this year and seems to be almost constantly sick. Last month she had a cold which turned into an ear infection, and before she finished her antibiotics, she got a stomach flu that lasted nearly a week. And less than a month later she has a cough and a fever which I am sure her little sister will get it in a day or two like she always does.

I would attribute that idea to the many times they've eaten cheerios off a floor that hasn't been clean for who knows how long, or stuck you don't even want to know what in their mouths. I would think they were just building up their immune system.

But then I started working out at a gym and enrolled my children in their children's class for an hour a day for about a month, and went to the doctor five times for two children in thirty days. It was obnoxious, I got sick, my husband got sick, we were all miserable, all because I decided I wanted to be healthy.

I started going to the gym at 5:30 in the morning, and won't let my kids back into that dern room.

So here are what I see as your options.

1)Take your kid out of the preschool. It might not be a clean one.

2)Home school.

3)Suffer through the first year or so it takes for them to build up their immunity, and hope for the best.

and 4)Try your best to enjoy the extra time you get to spend with them, because soon they will be teenagers and won't want cuddle on the couch with a big bowl of ice cream.

Hope they feel better soon,
~Sheena

Washing hands and not sharing personal items can help, but it's hard to teach children stuff like that, especially when you want them to learn to share (some things).

A smaller preschool or one that isn't also a daycare (so that the parents have more flexibility in keeping sick kids home) could also help.

The preschool is small and clean and does not double as a daycare. But kids just don't know how to keep their germs to themselves, and my kids are as bad as any others.

We only have one more month of preschool before summer starts. I am just worried that next year when she starts kindergarten that it will be as bad as this year was.

And I won't be homeschooling unless I feel it is absolutely necessary. I have nothing against homeschooling. I am really impressed with mothers and fathers who do it well, but it is just too much work for me. I'd never finish my blockbuster novels.

(1) It's important that kids get all their immunization shots...there's a certain amount of neglect in having kids immunized, what with the diseases dying out but the memory of how painful the shots were living on...

(2) You might be leery of overusing antibiotics, too...you might give a kid a powerful antibiotic for something minor and find you can't treat something major 'cause the kid has an immunity to that particular antibiotic. (This came up during the anthrax scare of 2001 / 2002...you give a postal worker the top antibiotic because he might have been exposed to anthrax, then down the road a couple of months he gets a urinary tract infection and is in real trobule.)

It reminds me of an article I read about allergies, it said that food allergies aren't actually allergies because it's not the same situation as pollen or other respiratory allergies. Which is true, it explained how it was to totally different thing physiologically, but it didn't change the fact that when I eat shrimp I feel like crap.