"I'm not cold!!"

Personally, IMO, let her be! Razz

I'd tell her that if she gets cold she isn't allowed to come snuggle up on me for warmth but I wouldn't force her to go put on clothes when she doesn't want them either.

We each have our own rates of body temp regulation and we each feel comfortable at different temps. She needs to learn for herself where her range is.

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Yeah, I was leaning that way. Have done that a couple of times but I feel mean.

Seems to be a good natural consequence, though.

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hehe Should I mention that's it's snowing here and I'm wandering around wearing a pair of shorts while Ms. Quinn is all bundled up and shivering??? Razz

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Snowing?! Seriously?

(Shorts?! Seriously?)

Found my first "maybe":

Quote:

Can a chill cause a cold?

There is no scientific evidence that chilling the body causes an increased susceptibility to infection or an increase in the severity of symptoms. However there is so much belief in the idea that chilling can cause a cold that it is possible that there may be a link between chilling and colds that has not yet been mimicked by scientists under laboratory conditions. One theory is that chilling of the body surface causes a pronounced constriction of blood vessels in the nose and that this may lower our resistance to infection. The idea is that when colds are circulating in the community many persons may be infected with a virus but not show symptoms. The chilling of the body surface then lowers resistance to infection in the nose and aids the viral infection. In this case the person has not caught a cold by chilling but activated a latent or sub-clinical infection that was already present in the nose.

http://www.cardiff.ac.uk/biosi/associates/cold/info.html

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Granted that we warm weather Californians are spoiled rotten, but 65 F would be cold for me too.

I used to buy "funny" socks with smiley faces on them or
bells and Jane loved to wear them. When my mother knitted
her some socks, she proudly wore them even in summer.
I also bought one of these soft fleece cardigans she liked to
wear. And sometimes she just wrapped herself in a fluffy
blanket.

Perhaps you could have a soft warm blanket close by
for sozlet when she feels cold.

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Oh! INside! I understand now.

65 degrees should be fine.

I don't like it when people put their cold hands or feet on me. In fact, I don't know anyone who does. So that is not okay. If she's cold, she knows where the warmy clothes and blankets are, right? Mom is not her personal heater.

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Quote:

The house definitely gets very dry one we have the heat on; there is a humidifying system but E.G. has mold allergies and is scared of it.

Cold air holds more moisture.

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When I was in 9th grade, I took my rebellious streak a bit too far and got in trouble at school. After much bargaining, my parents and I agreed on the following deal. I could do my homework (or not) participate in school (or not) and do whatever I wanted to; but only as long as my average grade was 2.5 or better. (That's B- in America) If my grades deteriorated beyond that, I would willingly follow whatever measures for improvement my parents would prescribe. It took only half a year until my grades improved way beyond the agreed threshold, and they stayed improved even after I resumed my habit of ignoring particularly boring homework.

Do you think Sozlet is old enough for a similar deal? "You can wear whatever you want, as long as you don't get sick. But when you do get sick, you will wear whatever I tell you to for the next three months." If she is old enough to understand and honor such a deal, you start out giving her the freedom she wants. Another advantage comes in play if your fears materialise, the rooms are indeed too cold, she does get sick, and you do want to force extra layers of clothes onto her. In this case, you don't have to "lay down the law", which she had no part in making anyway. Instead, you are enforcing a deal that she willingly agreed to, so might feel honor-bound to uphold. If the age factor didn't make me a bit uncertain, I would strongly recommend that you do it this way.

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I think it's warm air that holds more moisture, Noddy.

Soz, I wouldn't worry about her. I'd buy thermal clothing. It's light weight so she won't feel like she's weighted down with clothes. She really does know when she's cold.

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Swimpy wrote:

I think it's warm air that holds more moisture, Noddy.

That's correct. Warm air holds more moisture than cold air. To a first approximation, the air inside is the air outside with a different temperature. In summer, when the temperature is higher oudside than inside temperature, inside air can get moist. In winter, when the air is colder outside than inside, inside air gets dry.

I have seen two basic designs of air moisturizers so far. One basically consists of a cylindrical sponge through which water runs downward; there is a ventillator in the middle of the cylinder that blows the moisturized air out into the room. I can definitely see how that sponge can get moldy, and wouldn't recommend it for the house of a mold allergic. The other design is basically a pot of hot water that evaporates into the room's air. Depending on the materials used, I think such a design can give you moist air mold-free.

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Quote:

I think it's warm air that holds more moisture, Noddy.

I stand--actually, sit--corrected.

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I dunno. Dryness varies in different climate zones, whatere the temperature.

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right, Santa Fe is hot and dry, but Houston is warm and humid. I think air on either extreme may have issues with holding moisture and conditioned air will almost always be drier than natural air.

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tried to post this last night but couldn't get access to able2know. so here is my "2 cents canadian". :

soz : are you sure the sozlet's illness was caused by her being cold ? the way i understand it, one gets a cold from being infected by a "bug" . now if the shivers, that's a different thing.
as i'm getting older - understatement of the year - i like to put a sweater on when it gets "cool" , and put a fleecevest under my wintercoat.
when i see some of the highschool-girls (it seems to be mainly the girls ) running to the schoolbus in the winter, i get cold just looking at their skimpy outfits - but they seem to be surviving fine. hbg

from personal experience :
when ehbeth was a wee one, mrs h made sure that at night-time she was properly dressed/prepared for sleeping through a canadian winter night. mrs h had been a pediatric nurse in germany and thought she knew for sure to handle her own baby.
well ... despite her best efforts, we would ususally find ehbeth the next morning like houdini - she'd shed most of her bed-clothes ! seems ehbeth has survived after all without too much damage.

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Thomas, it's an interesting idea. I don't think there is a clear enough/ exclusive enough cause and effect relationship to work, though. As in, she's probably going to get sick at some point in the next few months, period. Even if it's not being cold that causes it/ makes her more vulnerable. I could just do it anyway -- see, you got sick, you have to wear more clothes -- but that doesn't feel right.

The other thing is that IF it's actually a risk factor, the chance of rectifying this situation isn't worth making it more likely that she'll get sick. While I'm reconciled to the fact that she will at some point, I'm doing my utmost to prevent it, as getting sick seems to start a rollercoaster ride that's really hard to get off.

Since I wrote this I've been laying off on telling her to put more clothes on, and she seems to be doing it herself more.

I'd still like to pin down whether steadily cold but nowhere near hypothermia-inducing temperatures have any harmful impact on the immune system... if the answer is definitely no, I'll relax already. (Seems likely, but there's that wisdom-of-the-grandmothers thing Dag mentions...)

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Oh, hadn't seen you hamburger...

Sozlet hasn't been sick yet this year (knock on wood), hope to keep it that way for as long as I can. I don't think she got sick last year because she was cold, no. I think she got sick last year for a lot of reasons, including the fact that she started preschool, as a general concept, and also that we moved here right before she started so she had very little exposure of any kind to the local germs. (As in, preschool is always a prime time to get very sick very often, but kids who live here from birth have some exposure to the local strains from older siblings, or going to the library, or whatever.)

I'm just trying to limit risks in whatever way I can, and am trying to figure out if this is in fact a risk (see above).

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I'll do the opposite of dag, except won't go find data for this...
short of hypothermia, which I was amazed to find can happen rather early last time I looked, though not at 65 degrees, worrying about an active child at 65 degrees is ..er, not necessary.

Shivering is interesting in itself. I admit to not thinking shivering is the greatest thing, in my own primordial years of grandmother stuff.

I was not particularly sickly and remember ice skating at -7, pre windchill factor, on South Blvd. pond. The skating makes you warm up, and there was a warming hut, and then the x number of block walk home to cocoa.

I have my doubts that closed skin pores (whatever) can somehow make you be more easily infected. Dryness I can see.

However, my own qualm, is that long ago and far away I remember hearing some viruses could be cold activated. That was in 1964 when I took virology and somehow I doubt this is a relevant memory, but I've always kind of wondered since if those were rhinoviri. Most likely not, or it would be in print. Lot of water under the science bridge since '64.

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sozobe wrote:

I'd still like to pin down whether steadily cold but nowhere near hypothermia-inducing temperatures have any harmful impact on the immune system... if the answer is definitely no, I'll relax already. (Seems likely, but there's that wisdom-of-the-grandmothers thing Dag mentions...)

I can't find the source, but about a year ago I read an article about "evidence based medicine", an enterprise that has set out to test "wisdom of the grandmothers" claims. As best I remember, "cold temperatures cause colds" was one hypothesis that was not confirmed. As you said earlier, it is the dryness of the inside air that gets your respitory system.

Since Ossobucco and littlek raised the point, maybe I should say something about relative humidity vs. absolute humidity. 'Absolute humidity' measures the mass of of water in any given volume of air. The warmer the air, the greater the mass of water it can hold. (Note, "can hold". Just because the air can hold more, that doesn't necessarily mean it does.) 'Relative humidity' measures a percentage of water in the air, where 100% represents the maximum amount of water the air can hold at this temperature.

Outside air and inside air tend to have similar absolute humidity because it tends to be the same air. But they have different relative humidity because their temperature is different. In winter, the outside air is cold so can only retain a small absulute amount of water. By contrast, the inside air is warmer, so what is 100% relative humidity for the outside air is less than 50% for the inside air. Our body feels humidity in terms of how easily water evaporates from its surface, which corresponds to relative humidity, not absolute humidity. It is that drop in relative humidity in the air inside that our respitory tracts react badly to. (That's what I read anyway. On a gut level, I still don't quite buy that temperature has nothing to do with it.)

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sozobe wrote:

I'd still like to pin down whether steadily cold but nowhere near hypothermia-inducing temperatures have any harmful impact on the immune system... if the answer is definitely no, I'll relax already. (Seems likely, but there's that wisdom-of-the-grandmothers thing Dag mentions...)

I dunno Soz. Grandma's advice seems a bit skewed to me. Have you ever noticed that contruction workers spend all winter outside and are rarely bundled up in heavy coats, scarves, etc..? IMO, it's more of a factor of what the individual is acclimated to.

We're only talking about a few degrees here. If you kicked the thermostat up to 72 in the house would you be as concerned about it?

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When children say they're not cold, they're either not cold or they're trying to annoy their mother.

It doesn't sound like a big deal to me Sozobe. I did raise two reasonably healthy kids in the cold and damp PNW. One of my kids really wasn't cold -- she just wasn't. She'd go out in the worst weather clad only in soccer gear and love it. The other child was always cold and knew it and did stuff like wear socks and sweaters.

I've found that kids are like that: uniquely different.

Of course, my cold child liked to hop into a hot bath tub, or better yet, stand under a hot shower 'til he ran out of hot water. Wait until Sozlet figures out these costly techniques.

Two aphorisms to remember this fall and winter:

Pick your battles.

Starve a cold, feed a fever.

I'd also ixnay on the "I'm so cold I need your warm tummy" unless... and this is a real possibility... it give you good hugging time. Then, you could say, "Aha, you've fallen into my well-planned trap and now are my huggy kid."

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"I'm not cold!!"

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