5 Items All Families Shouldn’t Be Without

When you have kids it seems that being thrown for a loop is a daily occurrence.  Like the time your kid paints the TV pink, or you walk in to a room to discover that your child has taken it upon herself to “decorate” the walls with every type of sticker imaginable, or even just the time you learned the hard way that apparently your child is actually allergic to mosquito bites (mosquito bites!!).  At these times, you need to make sure your arsenal is stocked and ready to go.  Here are 5 items that should be a part of that arsenal at all times.

Vinegar.  Yes, plain old vinegar that you probably don’t think about often has many helpful uses when you have kids.  For one, it gets many stickers off surfaces like walls and floors (though not all stickers, but we’ll get back to this).  It is also a good cleaner more generally which is nice to have when you need to clean a spot you know your kids are going to lick, crawl on, etc. and you don’t want them to be ingesting the chemicals that come with a poison warning.

Benadryl for Kids.  Most families don’t actually have Benadryl in the house until they know they need it.  This is a mistake.  The fact is, with kids, the time you’re going to realize you need Benadryl is most likely at midnight when you’re in your PJs and one kid needs it while another is puking or something of the sort.  The idea of having to get up and go to the pharmacy is not a fun one.   Trust me – just buy a bottle so that when your kids turns out to be allergic to nickel and breaks out because of a metal button, you are prepared.

Krazy Glue.  Although you need this, you also need to make sure it’s not somewhere the kids can get to it.  Last thing you want is a kid who has glued his hands together.  But, if your child is like most children, he has tons of toys with little pieces that break off and result in tears as big as watermelons.  No one wants to spend another $20 on a toy that will inevitably break again in two days, so instead of doing that, you can almost always fix said pieces with krazy glue.  It should at least hold things together for the necessary 5 days before your child forgets about said toy and has moved on to another.

Baby Wipes.  These aren’t just for babies.  These are all around awesome for various cleaning needs (like clothes, upholstery, or carpet; cleans keyboards, but not screens; shines shoes), especially for those with an artsy child.  Given that the “natural” or “gentle” kinds are also gentle on the skin, they can be used to clean hands quickly on the go instead of the alcohol-based hand sanitizers that aren’t recommended for kids.  Baby wipes are also good to clean cuts and scrapes for the child who is always taking risks.

Goo Gone.  This has been a recent entry to our home and it is fabulous.  Those stickers that are so sticky that the goo part seems stuck to the walls or floors forever?  Gone!  (See the pictures below to see an example from our door.)  In fact, we had a truly nasty sticker stuck to an antique china cabinet (from my husband’s side of the family) that we were worried about, but the Goo Gone got rid of it entirely with no negative effects to the wood at all.  We will not live without it again.

[caption id="attachment_12840" align="aligncenter" width="300"] First there were two...[/caption]

[caption id="attachment_12839" align="aligncenter" width="300"] Now there's only one![/caption]