3 year old keeps catching stuff - please reassure me

[Strugglingtoday12345]

DD aged 3 has been ill a few times since October. Mostly viral and self-resolving, but a couple of prescriptions of antibiotics which the GP described as "just in case" because her tonsils were very painful for a few days.

I'm just going a bit crazy because I can't help thinking it's something I've doing wrong. By way of context, she's not in nursery but she goes to playgroups and has a lot of playdates because she loves socialising.

I probably sound a bit nuts, don't I? I'm just tired and so stressed. Plus my DM keeps getting me wound up - this week she decided that DD keeps catching things because I let her co-sleep with me when she's ill or has had a nightmare, which DM has decided is germy. I'm just feeling very low and have nobody to lean on as I'm a single parent.

It's normal OP. I have two older DC and both caught stuff a lot at this age. Their immune systems aren't like ours and they just pick things up.

A tip re your Mother....don't share everything with her. My MIL used to feed my anxiety and I realised that if I stopped telling her things I was a bit worried about, then she couldn't stress me further.

Obviously tell her if you need to but the little things? Don't bother. You have Mumsnet for that. x

Hi OP,
Its likely the playgroups/playdates. I would imagine quite a few of the other children either go to nursery or have older DC in school and theres loads of stuff going round at the moment. Co-sleeping is not 'germy' and it didnt do my kids any harm.

And tell your mum to keep her neb out!

Thank you, both - that's helpful. Unfortunately it's impossible to keep my mother out of my business. Long story but she lives five minutes away and insists on providing (paid) childcare for my DD. So I can't hide the illnesses or even the co-sleeping because she'll be sniffing around and will know DD's sheets weren't used.

I know I sound utterly fucking pathetic. I honestly hate myself. My mother has just completely lost it the couple of times I've told her I was planning on moving house/ mixing up sources of childcare - lots of tears, telling me I was a cruel and selfish mother, emotional blackmail about how she might be dead soon etc. I had a major depressive episode a few years back (family stuff didn't help) and I honestly don't have the resilience to deal with those kind of attacks. Nobody in my family would back me up (my sibling seems to be low contact with all of us, my father likes to suck up to my mother even though they're divorced, and my mother's partner hates me because I put my foot down when he kept sending me inappropriate messages, which is another story). I don't want to feel like I'm crazy/ horrible but they get under my skin and make me doubt myself.