Fulfilling our Certificate of Exemption outlines in health

Its amazing when you start writing out what you dream/wish for your children and the things you'd like them to understand...they start to come true. Law of Attraction ;-)

As part of our Certificate of Exemption we have to outline what we would do for many areas...one is...

Health and Well-Being

Our goal for our daughter is that she understands the necessity of a healthy body, a healthy mind, and to continue to care for her body’s needs. There are many opportunities to learn about health in a home environment, and many ways for her to be physically active.

This time of illness has been a time of reflection for me. I've been worried that we've not been doing any 'learning'...a bit silly really as even while they are flat on their backs their little brains are still going (unless asleep...which has not been often enough for me).

But it also a time for taking note of our body and its needs... something of which I think we have been failing to do in this day and age.

We are moving too fast, we are doing so much, we are keeping up with the Jones so to speak. We've got to be in the city to have a good job, we've got to have a good job to pay for the house in the city....in the right area. Both parents have to work to pay for that....all their children have to pay for it too. So many things tangle up into this reasoning.

But often we keep going and going...and often we ask our children to keep going and going because we need to have that money. How many times have children been sent back to daycare still very sick because the parents do not have enough sick leave to keep them at home. The bugs spread and more children get sick and pass it on to their parents and they get sick but they keep going because they can't take anymore time off of work.

We can not stop. We have to keep doing as John Kabat-Zinn often talks about.... Human doings.

I would like to help my children take care of themselves by proper eating, sleeping, relaxing and when they do get sick taking the time to recover properly... because if we do that we will be more productive. We will be sick less. The work we do will be better because we will not be doing it with our brains half foggy with illness....AND we will not be passing on our sickness to others.

Learning about health is a BIG subject and I don't feel it is really even touched in schools...other than putting a happy face on a picture and talking about it. Empathy is one such quality that we need to learn in the home and from a very early age and good old 0-3 time frame.... and the poor old teachers (quoting Dave here) good luck to trying to teach the school bully about empathy when they have no ground work to begin with.

The class sizes also work against the teachers trying to get these parts of health across....but the topic is so large that well...lots to learn....good luck.