Flu? What Do We Do?

It’s hard to avoid the topic of H1N1 these days—it comes up in the schoolyard and around the meeting room table—and if you’re like me, you’re trying to decide how worried you should be and what you really need to know. Generally, I’m not a ‘panicker’ when it comes to my kids so I am trying to develop a ‘pandemic plan’ that will work for my family—some basic things we can do to try to stay well.
All the kids’ schools seem to have given them handwashing lessons and their teachers have heighted their awareness of the importance of washing hands, so that’s making my job easier as I am trying to make sure we do a little more handwashing at home. We’ve added a ‘wash your hands right after you get home from school’ session to our routine and the kids all took a bottle of hand sanitizer to school (whether they ever use will remain to be seen).

And I am thinking of getting vitamin C & D supplements for everyone in the family as I have been reading that they can be helpful in boosting our resilience and ability to fight off illness.

Other than that, we’ll try to eat lots of fruit and veggies—like we always try to anyway—and keep active and outside as much as possible. And if anyone does get sick, one of our savvy readers told us about a great article on CTV Mednews Express that provides a great outline of what to watch for, when to take your kids to the doctor and how to treat the flu, and we’ve got that bookmarked for reference, if we need it.

Running a small business like we do at SavvyMom, we’re also trying to make sure we have a good plan in place at the office in case H1N1 gets as bad as some say it will—I’ll be sharing some thoughts on what we’re doing here about it next week.

What are you doing to help keep you family healthy this winter? I’d love to know.