Parent hack health tips from Asha Dornfest

Family life is full of sniffles, ear infections, scraped knees, and other hazards we can’t anticipate – and nothing’s more exhausting or worrying than when your kid gets sick or hurt.

You can’t protect your kids from every virus or sharp corner, but you can arm yourself with a few tricks for simplifying sick days. Anything that helps your child (and you) stay calm and rested will help speed healing so you can both get back to normal life (whatever that means) as quickly as possible.

Your baby’s sick and needs X millilitres of medicine every Y hours for Z days… Sounds like the setup for a math problem. Keeping track of the dosing schedule can confound even the most organized person, especially if your sleep is disrupted and it’s a shared job.

Keep it simple by writing dosage amounts and timing directly on the bathroom mirror with a dry-erase marker, near the medication, so everyone’s on the same page.

Asha Dornfest is the founder of ParentHacks.com and coauthor of Minimalist Parenting. Parent Hacks is a Daily Beast “Beast Best” award winner, and is a three-time recipient of Babble’s “#1 Most Useful” parenting blog award.

Craighton Berman is a designer, illustrator, inventor, and adjunct professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He has design work in the permanent collection of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Excerpted from Parent Hacks®:134 Genius Shortcuts for Life with Kids by Asha Dornfest (Workman Publishing). © 2016. Illustrations © Craighton Berman.

Originally published in ParentsCanada magazine, February/March 2016.