Managing Medicines.

This week we are talking medicines – how to declutter them and different ways that you can store them.

First, as always, collect all the medicines together from wherever they are around the house and sort through them. This is quite an easy and satisfying category! Are there any that are out of date? How about half used prescription medicines? Or medicines that you no longer use? Let them all go!

Once you’ve been through the medicines, you need to decide if your storage is the best way for you as a household. There are so many different ideas out there as to how you can do store them. Some people like to label up lots of different boxes with labels such as, “Headaches”, “Vomiting”, “Cuts” etc, and if you have a lot of medicines, this can certainly be a good idea. As with everything else in my house, I like to keep medicines to a minimum and so I don’t need to have loads of different compartments. I have an old wicker hamper that we got years ago and inside it I have a couple of shoeboxes to divide up the medicines. On one side I have children’s medicines, in the middle I have the bag (again, something else we’ve had for a long time) full of plasters and bandages and on the other side I have the grown up medicines. This is all stored on top of a wardrobe so that it is out of reach of them children, and they know not to touch it anyway.

However, because I am a lazy motherlike to encourageautonomy for my children, I like them to be able to access various things without my help. My children are forever falling over and cutting themselves, or running into the nettles, or getting stung by something, so I have a little bag which is hung up next to the dog leads and it has plasters, antiseptic cream and bite cream so that they can treat themselves for these. I also keep the digital thermometer next to it so that it is easily accessible for me if they feel warm and I want to check if they have a fever.