When Zeameh and I found ourselves COVID-19 positive in June, I found myself searching for products that would help ease our discomfort and speed up our recovery. Infants hardly have any immune system at all and yet can hardly take any medicine or supplements at all. Here are the things I’d recommend keeping on hand through Autumn to help shorten symptoms and build up the immune system of your littles.
Infants:

The most important things to watch for in infants is dehydration, congestion that affects breathing and fever.

I have found this humidifier to be essential in the nursery no matter what since my firstborn, but it’s especially more necessary to heal COVID. Babies have teeny air passages that clog easily so the humidifier, saline and the nasal aspirator save the day multiple times a day. When your baby spikes a fever, a rectal thermometer becomes incredibly important. Anything over 100.4 is a fever but once it’s confirmed, my pediatrician let me know it’s to be expected. For the first couple days, the ER doctor encouraged us to use Tylenol since she was hovering around 101+ as a one month old. Once she was consistently in the high 99s, we switched to this homeopathic children’s fever reducer which our naturopath gave us a very specific dose for. Be sure to talk to your doctor before giving this to your newborn.

A daily infant probiotic is super important for both prevention and healing. Z doesn’t take a bottle yet so I put a little breastmilk in a teeny bowl and add the 5-8 drops of briar rose and lithy tree (which you can read more about here) along with Vitamin D and this probiotic and gave it to her daily. The briar rose and lithy tree can be added to breastmilk and given multiple times a day which made a tremendous difference when Keogena had RSV at 3 months old as well. Lastly, five drops of this extremely pure peppermint oil</a? in a roller filled to the top with fractioned coconut oil and rolled onto the feet each night helps act as a natural fever reducer as well. Remember essential oils from grocery stores and other unverified places are perfect for aromatherapy but should never be applied topically to a baby-only the purest form should be added to the roller.

Other things to have on hand just in case: the doctor said to pick up some pedialyte incase they lose their appetite and start to become dehydrated which thankfully, we only needed to use once. We also used lots of short sleeve onesies to keep her body cool and light muslin swaddles. This feeder with frozen breastmilk cubes is helpful too.

Children:

The briar rose and lithy tree added to water or orange juice is still a crucial step along with the humidifier and peppermint oil, but there is some more wiggle room with children. They can take medicine like this and this which helps as a prevention tool and a symptom easing tool. The chestal is a delicious, healing medicine that soothes the throat immediately. I also have the kids take this probiotic every single day of the year along with this liquid vitamin-c a multi-vitamin and omega 3’s.

This Speedread thermometer is my absolute favorite ever since it’s fast and accurate with easy-read technology that moves from green in a good range to yellow for a low-grade fever and red for a fever. Ours broke and for a while we tried to suffer through with two other brands and ended up ordering this again ASAP. Ice packs are super helpful to reduce fever and dipping washcloths into a bowl of ice water with a drop of peppermint is even more effective and soothing.
Not pictured: Vitamin C lollipops and these natural popsicles. Sugar and artificial flavors aren’t helpful for the immune system so I stick to these or make my own.
These will work wonders for their throat!

Just as a reminder–COVID is a big, nasty virus. Sometimes kids are asymptomatic-like my older two- and sometimes they have all the symptoms. As tempting as it may be to constantly use a fever reducer to get those numbers down, the fever is working hard to get that virus out of their systems. Keep them comfortable, manage it as best you can with all the monitoring, all the snuggles and all the