When to turn sick kids away

[cfred]

Welcome to the forum to you both! This time of year is tough and always is. Unfortunately, snotty noses can be pretty prevalent for a while. I tend to be a bit more lax with symptoms than others simply because if a parent had to keep their kids home for everything, they'd miss so much work (and so would I). I send them home with the following:

* Fever over 101F
*vomiting
*diahrrea
*must be vomit and diahrrea free for 24 hrs - don't listen to the parents who insist it's just something the child ate, and you'll hear this more than once I'm afraid. BS!!! If there's vomit, they need to go home.

I have a clause in my contract stating that I will contact parents in the event that their child requires Advil or Tylenol due to discomfort/fever, but if I cannot speak with someone within 20 minutes, I have the authority to make the call to medicate. Not many providers do this as they aren't comfortable with medicating for various reasons. I have no problem with it.

Sierra is right - reduce the number of toys if you can. I tend to do that anyway and rotate. One thing I've started doing is to have a basket up out of reach of the kiddies. When you see a child goobing it up, when he drops the toy, put it in the basket. During nap and at the end of the day, just those few toys can be disinfected. I've started doing that this year and it seems to be helping. Of course you can't do EVERYTHING...you'll drive yourself crazy trying. Just the well goobied ones. For disinfecting I use Dettol. We used it at one of my college placements and got the finger wag from Health Department as they insisted that we use bleach. However, my sensitive skin won't take that. I figure, if Dettol was good enough for hospitals, it's good enough for me. 4 - 5 cap fulls in a sink of hot water. Let toys soak for 5 mins or so, then rinse and air dry. This is my first year using the basket for daily disinfect (it really only takes a few minutes for this each day) and we've been booger free for over a month now. Hope that helps