IV Tape

It's been a week since we got our daughter home from the hospital.

A week since she's had the IV out.

And it's been a week of attempting to remove the remnants of the IV tape.

That stuff is nasty.

I've had my own experiences with the IV tape and after several days of scrubbing with those Brillo pad bath puffs, I resort to scraping it off with my fingernails.

Of course, I'm not going to scratch it off my infant daughter.  So, instead, we tried:

Soap & water= uhm, right.  No combination of soap and water is going to get this stuff off.  That goes for dish soap (like Dawn) to bath and hand soaps.

Lotion= Got some reaction from the tape lines, but it was more that it just got slick with lotion.

Baby Powder= especially at the beginning, we thought perhaps it would allow us to ball up the tape.  The answer there is, no.

Alcohol= You'd think if something isn't water-soluble, it would be alcohol-soluble.  But, even scrubbing with an old sock instead of a cotton ball, lead to one pissed off little kid...with tape on her.

I actually broke down and asked the pharmacist at Walgreens when we picked up her prescription.  I thought perhaps they would have heard something good.  She recommended Goo-Be-Gone.

Sorry, put I'm not putting toxic solvents on my infant daughter, though for an adult I thought I might try that if I needed to in the future.

Goop= Being motorcyclists, my husband and I have the need of getting greasy occasionally   He's got this soap-free hand cleaner called Goop that we tried.  It was actually able to remove some small part of it, but it took a great deal of rubbing with an old sock to get anywhere.  And, yes, it is safe to use on children, per the packaging, but I was a little concerned by how much  would be safe for children.

Finally, I was putting Aquaphor on my daughter's teething-rash cheeks and I decided to rub some of that on there.

Worked like a charm.  No real rubbing required.  Just rub in the ointment and the tape comes right off.  And definitely child safe.  And, unlike Vaseline, Aquaphor absorbs into the skin, so we didn't have to worry about the greasy petroleum getting all over her clothes or preventing another bandaid from sticking.

So, we finally found something that is child-safe and removes IV tape.