Thursday, July 12, 2012

Kids and Motion Sickness


We are heading on vacation shortly and a few family members are talking about going on a Whale Watch. I would love to go and think it would be a blast. Well that is if we didn’t have a puker among the bunch. Poor Isabelle has been cursed with motion sickness since she was a mere 14 months old. I can remember vividly the first time she got car sick. It was Christmas Eve and we were on our way to my aunt and uncle’s house. She was our first, still a baby, and had never even thrown up before and all of a sudden out of nowhere got sick. We were totally unprepared for it but cleaned things up the best we could after stopping at a McDonald’s to get napkins. She then spent that Christmas Eve in mismatched pajamas instead of the adorable outfit I had picked out for her.

Then shortly afterwards it happened again, and again, and again, and again. From the time she was 14 months old until she was about 2 and a half she threw up on ANY trip over 45 minutes.  Add in to that a trip with any type of stop and go traffic and that time was cut in half. Now we can easily get to a lot of places around us in less than that time but we have lots of family and friends that live in surrounding states that we visit frequently. It became a known joke that if we were coming to make sure you had your washing machine empty so that we could wash the car seat cover upon arrival. We bought all kinds of covers, pads, and floor mats to help the cause but it was still a lot of vomit. She was so young in the beginning that she couldn’t tell us that she felt sick so it was a nightmare. By the time we knew she was ill, she was actively throwing up and one of us was trying to catch the remainder in a nearby bucket. Driving alone with her? Forget about it.

Oh, and her motion sickness didn’t stop with just car sickness. She got sick over any kind of motion. I remember one night after a long day when she was having a hard time getting to sleep I decided to sit with her in the rocking chair. I don’t know what I was thinking on that one because sure enough a few minutes later she threw up all over me. She also used to get sick while swinging on swings. This summer at 4 years old is the first time that she can actually swing and truly love it without having any side effects. Last year we went to Story Land and she wasn’t able to go on any of the rides because the first one we went on (which was slow and had no turns) made her feel sick. Poor kid.

I did talk to her doctor about it and was advised to give her Benadryl on longer car trips (too young for Dramamine at the onset). Luckily, that worked very well.  Who knew that Benadryl worked to help with nausea? Of course, we didn’t want to be constantly drugging her so we only did it on out of state trips but it was still a huge lifesaver for us.

As she has gotten older her motion sickness has gotten much better. She is generally okay on long car trips (even without being drugged) unless the trip is really windy or there is lots of traffic. It took us a long time to get here though and a whale watch is definitely not in the cards for us anytime soon!

Road trip, anyone?

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