Most medicine for babies comes with convenient droppers, syringes, or dispensers. This is definitely true for the most common things that get administered such as most antibiotics, Tylenol, and Tri-Vi-Sol. However, should you find yourself unlucky enough to have to administer something slightly more exotic, you may need something like the
Safety 1st Bottle Medicine Dispenser
. This medicine dispenser came in a set that was gifted to us before our daughter was born and we didn't think much of it. Unfortunately we had to use it during two separate episodes in her infancy.
Iron for Anemic Babies
All children get tested for anemia (low iron levels) at their 1-year well child visit. Children who are thought to be at risk for some reason get tested at 9 months. If a child is determined to be anemic, a high dose iron supplement is prescribed along with a recommendation to dissolve it in juice that's high in vitamin C. The juice advice is both for taste reasons (liquid iron tastes pretty rotten) as well as for improved absorption reasons (vitamin C helps the body absorb the iron more efficiently). However, when my daughter was prescribed this at 9 months, she had never even had water, let alone juice, and she certainly didn't know how to drink out of anything other than a boob or a bottle. This is where the
Safety 1st Bottle Medicine Dispenser came in really handy. It allowed us to present her with a familiar drinking mechanism (a nipple). By filling this tiny bottle with juice and iron solution we could be sure that she could finish the whole thing thus getting the entire prescribed dose.
The Truly Exotic
When my daughter was five months old, someone walked into the office building that houses her daycare with an active case of tuberculous. This caused the Department of Public Health to mandate that all the children in the day care receive two months of prophylactic drugs. The closest I've ever come to quitting my job and moving to a ranch with a shotgun was when we had to figure out how to procure and administer drugs not designed for babies in the US. Nothing makes you question your life choices more than attempting to grind 1/4 of a pill into your previously perfectly cherubic child's milk. This was the first time we remembered about the medicine dispenser as we were specifically instructed to dissolve it in less than an ounce of milk. I understand that this situation is blissfully unique, however, should you find yourself needing to dissolve something in a small quantity of liquid to administer to your baby, this may very well save your sanity.
