One of the most difficult parenting decisions I find I have to make is determining how sick the children are when they claim to be sick and aren’t really or when they actually are sick and don’t claim to be.

Are they so sick they need to go to the doctor? Are they so sick they need to stay home from school?

The problem with “being sick” is that sometimes it’s not as simple being sick or not. There are varying degrees of “being sick,” some real and some imagined.

Running a high fever (over 100 degrees), diarrhea, or puking are clear evidence of “being sick.”

But it’s the in-between symptoms: low grade fever, tummy hurts, head hurts, (fake) coughing, that are the problem for me. It’s difficult to determine if they’re too sick to go to school or if they’re just suffering from wake-up irritability!

“So, just how sick are you?”

I mean, if they’re running a high fever or throwing up, then I need to stay home from work and be with the kids. I need to take a day of sick leave!

But if I’m spending a sick leave day, then they better plan on staying in bed and resting all day so I can catch up on the sleep I missed from staying up with them all night the night before.

But, if  I make a wrong decision about how sick they really are (or aren’t), then my day of sick leave becomes their play-day-with-Poppy-all-to-myself, and so much for any hope of a morning or afternoon nap (not them, me)!

And, it’s a double whammy when they get sick on the weekend. The doctor’s office isn’t open and you have to decide whether you should take them to the clinic or even the emergency room. And then you work all weekend nursing them back to health and when they recover and go back to school on Monday, then you have to go back to work even though you’ve worked all weekend!

I think there should be a sick-and-tired-of-the-children-being-sick leave day.

Seriously, though, it’s tough sometimes deciding just how sick the children are. Take a look at the pictures in this post and then tell me, are these children really sick? Just how sick are they?