Items for Families to Remember for Their Trips to Haiti

Not every parent will have the opportunity to visit their children before they bring them home. Many times, your experience will not be like ours was where your children will stay with you "24/7" at a hotel away from the orphanage during the time you're in Haiti.

These are the items I was glad I brought or wish I'd brought:

• baby medicine droppers
• Big ziploc bags (for dirty clothes)
• Tide laundry detergent (we washed things in the sink multiple times per day because Lexi was so sick)
• spare flat sheets (there were a few nights where we had to change the sheets because Lexi had been sick during the night)
• Febreeze and Ozium (again, there were a lot of not so pleasant smells)
• LOTS of small bills ($1 and $5 USD) for tipping at the restaurant, room service, etc
• Children's TYLENOL (not Motric - apparently many Haitians are allergic to Motrin as we found out the hard way)
• Antifungal cream (like for athelete's foot) to treat ringworm. The OTC stuff isn't as strong as prescription, but it still helped.
• Olive oil (Walgreen's sells a cream that works into hair rather nicely).
• Spray bottle (for water to wet their hair when fixing it in the AM)
• Dishsoap (we had to wash out bottles throughout the week)
• washcloths and towels (we never could get the hotel to give us enough for a family of 4 with sick kids)
• lots of baby blankets (we put Lexi on one every time she slept which made "blowouts" easier to deal with)
• Pedialite and Pediasure
• Sunglasses and hats for everyone
• bug spray
• multiple sizes of diapers (Lexi had lost so much weight that she ended up needing the size we brought for our 5 month old!! If one of the other moms hadn't had extra of that size we would have been in serious trouble)
• Orajel (if the child might be teething)
• flat rubber drain stop (neither our tub nor our sink's drains worked properly so it made it hard to wash things - children included)

Hope this helps someone somewhere!