So from day 1 if you breastfeed, you are given vitamin D drops to give your little one from the hospital. This is because breastmilk is low in vitamin D and they recommend supplementing (especially for those of us who live in the tundra where we don’t see the sun for 6 months). Between those, gripe water for the nights of upset tummy, tylenol for the night after shots or long nights of teething, we struggled to get our baby to take medicine. That’s why I’m putting together this giving baby medicine tips and tricks post for you.
It never really clicked for me, but all baby meds come in liquid form. This makes sense since they can’t swallow solids until at least 4-6 months, but it sure makes it difficult to get them to swallow. We tried a few things and found some tips to help us.
Giving Baby Medicine Tips
1. Put drops on nipple, bottle nipple, or pacifier
Might sound like common sense, but we were trying to put the drops on our finger and stick it in her mouth. I was always worried if my finger was clean, what if it runs off, or worst of all, when she got teeth, she’d bite me. Using the nipple works well when you’re going to feed because they’ll be sucking for awhile anyway. We also found the pacifier worked well for us because she would sit and suck on it for a long while. Of course this won’t work if your little one doesn’t take a pacifier, but they should be taking milk or formula!
2. Taking Tylenol
If you haven’t tasted that infant tylenol – I dare you. It’s basically straight sugar. We had a grape flavored one, and I see why our daughter fought us on taking it because it is NASTY. That said, there were some nights that we really needed her to take some. We found for teething that it worked well to let her almost nibble on the syringe when we were giving it to her, and do it in small spurts. If you push too much at one time, it’s likely all just going to run out of their mouth.
3. Gripe Water or other watery liquids
The medicine dropper that came with gripe water was something special in comparison to those handy syringes for the tylenol. We had issues with it all dripping out and running on the counter, floor, and about everywhere other than baby’s mouth. Early in infancy, we just held the dropper sideways and did it in parts (usually about 1/4 of the dose per attempt). If it ran out of her mouth, so be it. What we learned after is that we could use the syringe from her tylenol to give her these other liquids. We just washed it really well between uses. Totally controlled the dripping!
This may come as common sense to a lot of you, but for us we spent quite a bit of time (especially around 3 AM, trying to get our fussy baby to take down her meds and finally found some little tricks to make life easier.
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This post is pretty basic information but are tips and tricks we found that worked for us. It may not be easy to get baby to take down their liquids/medicines, but hopefully these ideas can help ease the process. Did you do anything different that helped? Let me know in the comments below!
-Cassie
