alt Hacker NewsNo kids eh?
My oldest starting preschool was one of the worst times in my life. We were sick from august to december, then january to may. Dreadful.
It got better. My youngest is 3 now and is ahead of where my oldest was due to having 2 older siblings importing illnesses for several years, and this year we finally were mostly not sick all school year. Which is to say, we were probably closer to the 15 days "materially sick" mark. I say materially sick to mean, definitely sick, though perhaps not taken out of school (due to not technically being outside of the health exclusion policy, and sometimes I only realize they were "materially" sick after they got home instead of just "passably sick given kids will basically have a lingering cough from august to may).
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This happened to us too, until I heard the podcast about Vitamin D. Nipped that in the bud almost immediately.
For me personally, I never was so sick in my life as when my children were between starting nursery school and 3. It was not just respiratory diseases: It was also the time in my life I and my wife had frequent digestive infections. Ohh my...How many times I could not move for 2 days. It felt like I was 80 years old, mixed with the hardest symptoms of food poisoning.
I got sick so often it limited a lot my general life: I stopped practicing sports regularly and started being very careful with sleep(sleep deprivation likely increased the chance of infection), because I knew if I did not lead a perfectly balanced lifestyle I would get sick. I am quite upset I stopped running 15km per week, even with snow. I never fully went back to it, due to fear of getting sick, and having to take care of toddlers while being feverish or nauseated.
In those years I think I was not disease free more than 3 months at a time. In a year where many people decide to not have children, it does not help the cause of having children seeing other parents suffer so much, in those early years. I have non parent friends that get sick after meeting us, resenting meeting us and asking if we are sick, because they spent all the night in the bathroom or with fever. Fortunately it feels we are already immune because we are not sick very often anymore.