Before stocking up on first aid supplies and medicines for your little ones first think about what you use regularly at home. Do you use Calpol and Vicks for a cold? Does a Peppa pig soother come out of the fridge every time there is a fall? Is Nurofen your favourite trick for teething? Make sure they are included in your family travel first aid kit by default.
Depending on where you are travelling and for how long will dictate what you really need to pack and what you can leave at home.You could be forgiven for thinking that your destination will stock the same healthcare products as home, but be warned – they don’t! Here are a few of our experiences to learn from.
When Poppet was 15 months old we went to Orlando in Florida. During our holiday Poppet had a terrible episode of nappy rash. We had nothing more than a couple of sachets of Calpol with us assuming that we could easily buy something like kids’ paracetamol in the US. We were quite wrong. Every bottle of acetaminophen (the American name for paracetamol) said from 2 years plus. In the end, in a Disney baby change with a screaming Poppet, I bought some Tylenol for children older than 2 and did the dose calculations to work out what to give her (I work in healthcare so have experience of this and I wouldn’t recommend you do this if untrained as the strength of medicines are quite different to the UK). Even if it is easy to buy children’s paracetamol at your destination it might not be in a flavour your child is used to. The ones I saw in the US tended to be grape and cherry! In the UK it is Strawberry. When your little one is off-colour something familiar is usually best in your family travel first aid kit.
I was also 20 weeks pregnant with Champ during this holiday and suffering from pretty bad heartburn. Another assumption was that I would be able to get Gaviscon or something similar. I didn’t want to carry 2 great big bottles out with me taking up half my luggage allowance and the few chalky tablets I had wouldn’t last long. There was nothing remotely similar I could get without visiting a doctor first. So I was wrong again!
When Poppet was 2 years old we stayed in a lovely toddler-friendly gite in Normandy, France. She settled well on our first night but woke up in the morning with a rash on every exposed bit of skin. The only explanation was that she had a reaction to the laundry detergent on the sheets. Did we have an antihistamine with us? No. We could buy something similar to Benadryl cream on a Pharmacy but there was no mixture that we could buy. We then had the task of rewashing and drying a duvet cover, sheet and pillow case in less than a day in a gite with no tumble dryer or central heating which we could switch on, and it was pouring with rain outside. But we did it!
Our third cautionary experience is when we travelled to France when Champ was a bit older. I had learnt from our previous experiences, almost. Whilst on the ferry Champ was full of cold and really miserable. I had packed plenty of Calpol, Nurofen, Vicks etc, but they were all helpfully in the car. I went to the little shop on board and asked if we could buy any children’s’ paracetamol but the answer was a resounding no! The ferry was owned by the French firm Brittany Ferries and in France you can’t buy children’s’ medicines anywhere other than a pharmacy so even on a ferry you can come unstuck and should always carry a sachet or two in your handbag or daysack.
So in summary:
Here are the basics that I would recommend taking with you in or with your first aid kit. I would recommend taking a decent first aid kit with you but you may need to tinker with this to make it a bit more child-friendly. The bits I would add are as follows:
Medicines I would suggest you consider taking (when traveling from the UK)
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