Sickness and trick-or-treats

By The Working Mom by Kay Luna, from the     10/29/09 10:00am

Has the H1N1 scare impacted your Halloween plans?

It has for our family.

We typically go trick-or-treating before Halloween at a special event held at my 91-year-old grandma's elderly housing complex, but it was cancelled this year. Why? Mostly to protect the old people, who might be susceptible to the virus, if it was brought into the building for that large gathering.

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I also see it as protecting children like my daughter, who could catch it from a school-aged kid or adult. She hasn't had the vaccine yet (and we're still trying to determine if we'll get it for her or not - but that's fodder for a whole other blog post).

Now, we're thinking twice about where we might take Babycakes trick-or-treating, if we do it at all. She's still young enough that she would be happy dressing up at home, and "finding" candy hidden around the house to put in her Halloween bucket.

We figure, why potentially expose her to H1N1 when we don't need to? I keep thinking about all of those strangers and their unknown germs. Am I becoming germaphobic??? My hands are drying out from all the hand sanitizer I've been using at work, and I keep hearing about kids and adults getting sick all around me.

On the other hand, this is such a cute age at Halloween. We were really looking forward to seeing her finally enjoy going door-to-door (last year, we made it around two blocks, I'm guessing, and I carried her most of the time).

Here's a link to a Parenting magazine article that offers a few quick tips for meshing the two (H1N1 scare and trick-or-treat).

So, what do you think? Is this a dilemma at your house, too?

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