It’s officially cold and flu season. Everyone (especially parents of young children) rejoice! Like it or not, it will find your family soon enough. Along with my condolences, I want to pass along my cold and flu season essentials to help you ease your misery.
We’ve all been there. The call comes in from school that your kid has a fever and needs to be picked up as soon as possible. You go get your kid, come home and bundle him up on the couch, and head to the medicine cabinet to grab the Tylenol. But you’re out of children’s Tylenol. UGH. That means you have to extract your sick kid from the couch, throw him in the car and head to the nearest drug store to pick up some Tylenol. The whole time you’re furious with yourself for running out of children’s Tylenol and your mini me is asking you why you didn’t have medicine for him when he was sick.
If you’d like to avoid this frustration (and sass from your sick kid), now is the perfect time to make sure your medicine cabinet is well-stocked with all your cold and flu season essentials.
Disclaimer
Before we get into my list of cold and flu season essentials, a bit of a disclaimer. I am not a medical professional. I’m simply a mom whose kids get sick and gets her sick herself with sometimes alarming regularity during cold and flu season. The items I deem to be cold and flu season essentials are just those items that I have found to be good to have around the house at this time of the year. If you or your kid gets sick, please consult your doctor and don’t rely on this list as medical advice. OK, now let’s get into it.
Cold and Flu Season Essentials
Medicine
The first thing that probably comes to mind when thinking about cold and flu season essentials is medicine. When you or your child isn’t feeling well, you want to help the sickness symptoms, and you often first turn to over-the-counter pharmaceuticals. They are definitely good to have!
Pain relievers/fever reducers
The first line of defense for most ailments is a pain reliever or fever reducer. Typically, this means acetaminophen (Tylenol) and/or ibuprofen (Motrin). Tylenol is your classic choice when a fever is present, and Motrin works great on the general aches and pains that come with feeling crummy.
Allergy medicine
Yes, you can have seasonal allergies in the Fall! My son and my husband both have been suffering with allergy symptoms lately. My husband has largely been dealing with weepy eyes, and my son has had a runny nose. We typically opt for loratadine tablets for the grown-ups in my house and cetirizine liquid for the kids. Talk to your doctor to see what might work best with your symptoms and stock up!
Food and beverage
In addition to having over-the-counter medicines on hand, it’s also good to stock your pantry with some food and beverage products that can help when you or your kid gets sick. Don’t forget these foods and beverages when you’re stocking up on cold and flu season essentials!
Chicken soup
Ah, chicken soup, the cure for whatever ails you. Seriously, there is some kind of magic in chicken soup that just makes you feel better. The easiest way to make sure you have this magic elixir on hand is to buy a few cans of your favorite pre-made chicken soup. If you really want to up the ante, you can make a homemade chicken soup and freeze it in single portions (without the noodles!). Whatever option you choose works!
Electrolytes
When you are dealing with sickness, you need some sort of electrolytes on hand to keep hydration levels high. The classic choices here are Gatorade or Pedialyte, but there have been so many newcomers to the electrolyte scene lately. My preference is Liquid I.V. because I really enjoy many of their flavor options. They also make kid-specific products too but go with whatever flavor calls out to you. For me, that’s the tropical punch flavor.
Warm beverages
Warm beverages are also essential when you aren’t feeling well. This is especially true when you’re dealing with some sort of sinus/upper respiratory congestion. My favorite warm beverages to choose when I’m not feeling well are decaf, herbal teas and warm apple cider. Warm beverages work for kids too, just be very careful about the temperature of the beverage and the quantity you’re giving them.
Other helpful items
The largest category of cold and flu season essentials is the sort of mish mash of miscellaneous stuff that you just need to have lying around when sickness hits your house. It’s easy to forget about these random things, so make sure you’ve got them as you’re grabbing the more obvious items that you need to buy seasonally.
Thermometer
Please make sure that you have a working thermometer. I’m sure you have a thermometer, but it might not be accurate. Test that out now and buy a replacement if yours is significantly off. You don’t have to spend a lot of money to get a good, accurate thermometer. I like the low-tech kind that you just stick under the tongue or in the armpit. If you want to go the oral route, grab some thermometer covers to keep things clean.
Saline spray
Perhaps my favorite thing to keep in the house for cold and flu season is saline spray. I find that it really helps to ease my congestion symptoms and it seems to help my kids when they’re feeling yucky too. You can use it throughout the day whenever you’re feeling a bit dry, but I like to at least do a squirt up each nostril before I get in the shower and right before bed. Make sure you have a tissue nearby after you squirt!
Each family member needs his or her own bottle of saline spray. Please don’t share!
Humidifier
Another item near the top of my list of cold and flu season essentials is the humidifier. I have asthma, so I like to be able to control the humidity in my surroundings as much as I possibly can. We have a fairly simple humidifier in each of the bedrooms in our house that we run most nights when the heat is on, even though we do have a whole-house humidifier. It is especially helpful when someone is sick or having a bit of a hard time breathing so that sleep can come. And what is more important than sleep?
Ice packs
It’s also a great idea to keep some ice packs in your stash of cold and flu essentials. If you have a fever, sometimes the only thing that helps is an ice pack along your forehead, so make sure you have one available before cold and flu season really gets going. For adults and older kids, any ice pack will do (heck, even a package of frozen peas is fine), but for the tiniest among us, it might be a good idea to keep a more friendly version of an ice pack around. We used a bunny thing that they could just hold on their foreheads when they had a bit of a fever when they were super young.
Tissues
OK, so you might be thinking that this is an obvious thing to have on a list of cold and flu essentials, but you’d be surprised just how often you run out of tissues. This is especially true if your family has already been hit by a virus of some sort this season. When anyone is ill, tissues seem to evaporate into thin air. So this is your sign to go buy more tissues. Buy them in bulk. Stash them in every room of your house. This is not something you want to be without during cold and flu season.
Hand sanitizer
You should probably have hand sanitizer handy all year, but it’s especially important if you have sickness in the house. Make sure you are sanitizing your hands, your kids are sanitizing their hands, your partner is sanitizing his or her hands. I prefer the spray variety, especially when you have smaller kids around who might need some help.
COVID-19 tests
A newer entry to the list of cold and flu season essentials, it’s important that you have some COVID-19 tests handy to make sure that you’re stopping the spread of this particular virus. Make sure you check the expiration dates for any COVID-19 tests you have in your medicine cabinet and get new ones if yours are out of date.
Aquaphor
I’m sure you probably have Aquaphor on hand because there are so many uses for this wonder product. And with all these uses, why is it on my list of cold and flu season essentials? It’s the best thing to have on hand for chapped lips and noses. Lather up your nose and your lips right before you head to bed or tuck your kids in for the night to avoid bright red, angry noses and mouths in the morning.
Comfort items
When you’re feeling sick, it’s helpful to have something handy that can offer you a bit of comfort. As an adult, my preferred comfort item is a big old cozy hoodie from my alma mater. My kids prefer their stuffed friends, a moose for my son and a flamingo for my daughter. Don’t underestimate the power of these comfort items!
Adults only
The above-listed cold and flu season essentials are largely applicable to everyone in the family – adults and kids alike. There are some items that are helpful for sick grown-ups, but shouldn’t be used when children get sick. Make sure you keep these well out of reach of little hands.
Cold medicine
Many over-the-counter cold medicines contain a cocktail of fever reducers, pain relievers, decongestants, cough suppressants, and/or antihistamine and can really help sick grown-ups who still need to function. My favorite cold medicine is TheraFlu because it delivers cold medicine in a hot beverage, which kills two birds with one stone. That’s the mom in me, always looking for efficiencies!
Cough remedies
If you have a wicked cough with your ailment this cold and flu season, you probably would like to have something to tamp it down so you can do things like talk, eat, and breathe. Cough remedies come in many varieties – tablets, liquids, and lozenges. I prefer Cepacol lozenges when I get a nasty cough. If you go this route, make sure you read the dosing instructions on the box and don’t absentmindedly pop them one after the other all day.
Other posts
If you’re looking for other helpful posts, be sure to check these out:
I hope you and your family stay as healthy as possible this cold and flu season. If you do get sick, I hope these items help your recovery so you’re back on your feet as soon as possible. If you have other cold and flu season essentials, please share them down below or on Instagram @sarainseason.