At least on member from our family has been sick for the month and at first I thought, "Great! We'll all be healthy when the new baby comes," but we just keep getting sick and passing it around, so I thought it might be good to discuss some of the things we could do better to try and stay healthy.
Hand washing- We all talked about using soap and water to get in between fingers and the backs of hands as well. We are great at washing food off our hands after we eat, but not as good at washing before we eat- which is more important for our health! We made a family goal to try and remember to wash before we eat.
Hand sanitizer- if we don't have a sink, use this instead- particularly at preschool before snack, for my 4 year old. I gave him some for his backpack.
Food- don't share dishes, food, and drinks with other people, even in the family. They could be sick already and not show symptoms. (and I need to stop eating the food off my kids' plates when they waste...)
Sleep- sleep is when our body does the most fixing, so we need to all make sure we get enough!
Nutrition- if we eat healthfully, our body will have what it needs to fight infection. Keep taking our vitamins every day too.
Sneezing and Coughing- we practiced covering with our elbow and turning away especially when sneezing. (our elbows have monsters in them that like to eat coughs and sneezes :D)
Don't touch your face (and for our kids, don't suck your thumb!)- germs get in through our eyes, noses and mouths, so we need to be sure we don't touch those with our hands unless we're sure they are clean.
We did this for our family home evening tonight. My initial hope was to make it very interactive meaning we would physically go wash our hands, we would pretend to sleep, we give each of us a bowl with two blueberries or something in it and talk about why we don't share food etc. BUT we had friends call us at the last minute and asked if we wanted to go have dinner with them and we decided to go. Because of that, we needed to do FHE before we left and we were leaving in 20 minutes. SO, instead, I googled a picture of each of the topics. I would pull one up, ask K1 what it was and then explained how that topic affects our being healthy. We reviewed all the things twice. We'll see how they stick. One funny side note: we told K1 that being healthy meant that we weren't sick. K1 seemed to only remember the word sick because he interrupted us 4 or 5 times in the lesson saying 'sick people go in ambulances'. Cute guy.
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