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" First, see what you have. Go through your medicine cabinets and drawers today and throw out anything that is expired. As a professional organizer, I often joke that I wish everything had expiration dates \u2014 it&amp;#039;s so much easier to organize when you&amp;#039;re told it&amp;#039;s time to chuck it. (For questions about expired cosmetics you&amp;#039;ll find while sorting, try reading &amp;quot;Have Your Beauty Products Gone Bad?&amp;quot;) Be safe. You don&amp;#039;t want someone to ingest the medications you discard, either accidentally or purposefully. You can follow these guidelines from the FDA to safely dispose of medications. Also, every six months the DEA has a National Prescription Drug Take Back Day, which may provide an easy disposal option for unwanted or unused prescription drugs. Make a shopping list. Write down anything that needs replacing or refilling, and create a shopping list for cold and flu season needs as well as other items you might need for a properly stocked medicine cabinet. Here is a very useful guide, &amp;quot;Medicine Chest Must-Haves.&amp;quot; To that, I would add cough syrup, day and night combination cold remedies, antihistamine and decongestant pills, and sore throat spray. Make sure you also buy children&amp;#039;s versions of these, if applicable, and have some children&amp;#039;s dosing syringes and spoons handy. RELATED: How to Prepare Your Home for an Emergency Sort and store. If you have much more than will fill up your small medicine cabinet shelves, first sort your general medications by what they do. For example, you can label small bins for &amp;quot;Fever &amp;amp;amp; Pain,&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Digestion,&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;Ear-Nose-Throat.&amp;quot; You can use shoeboxes and even narrow drawer dividers on shelves to get quick visibility to these categories. Keep an additional small bin there for thermometers and extra liquid dosing cups. Family members can also have their own bins, labeled with each person&amp;#039;s name, that include their own prescription medications and any vitamins and supplements they take. Use &amp;quot;M-T-W-T-F&amp;quot; sorting organizers for each person to deal out supplements and medications once a week and avoid opening all of the bottles every day. Where to keep the medicine. A deep bathroom cabinet or linen closet can work well, but remember, you don&amp;#039;t have to keep all your medications in the bathroom. Sometimes it&amp;#039;s better to keep them in the kitchen, where more family members can reach them as needed. Plus, you may have more storage space there. Also, the humid environment of many bathrooms is not always best for medication storage. Wherever you decide to keep them, make sure they are up high enough and even secured with safety locks, if necessary, to protect small children from accidental ingestion. Lorie Marrero is the best-selling author of &amp;quot;The Clutter Diet: The Skinny on Organizing Your Home and Taking Control of Your Life&amp;quot; and the creator of ClutterDiet.com. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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