marvelous medicine.

Being sick is the worst. Being sick for the first time without your mother there to take care of you is the ABSOLUTE worst. It's up to you to get out and pick up your medicine. The soup won't make itself, so hop on out of bed and get that simmering. It's now your job to give that nice, sympathetic back rub - to yourself. If this isn't self-pity, my friends, I don't know what is.

Now that we're setting up our own house away from our parents, I want to avoid the tragically horrific sick day at all costs. How do we do that? A rockin' medicine cabinet - that's how. 

When we first moved in, our medicine cabinet was a jumbled mess of every medicine Mr. Spouse and I had ever owned. There were inhalers, tablets, creams, liquids, and band-aids galore. I mean, GALORE. It was embarrassing. I wish I had a picture to show you how awful it was. So when reorganizing the cabinet, the first thing I needed to do was clean out all of the expired medicines and illness-specific prescriptions that were more than a year old. Once we were all up-to-date, I then started grouping the medicines to see how many cabinets, drawers, or shelves I would need to buy. 

I decided that we had 4 different types of medicines (vitamins, fever/pain relief, tummy aches, and allergies/colds) and would then also need a container for first aid items. I headed to Bed, Bath, and Beyond where I found stackable drawers that would fit my need perfectly! After sorting, stacking, and labeling, our medicine cabinet now looks like this:

I was able to find a 3-drawer system to store all of our first aid supplies, and then got larger drawers to house the larger bottles of medicine.

     

I love that the drawers are ailment-specific and that all of the medicines we have are contained right here. It lets me take inventory from time to time to insure we have all of the medications we might need. Further, each drawer is so easy to remove and is washable, making cleaning up any spilled or busted bottles a breeze!

 

One of the most important lessons I had from this task was that cleaning out and tossing expired medicines regularly is a MUST! I was shocked at the number of out-dated medicines we had that needed to be replaced. 

But the most important lesson I learned was to be overwhelmingly thankful for your mother and her exceptional skills as a nurse! At least now that our medicine cabinet is up-to-date and well-stocked, Mr. Spouse and I are ready to pretend that we are adults for just a moment and care for ourselves!