The medication routine

First of all! Look at this kid. What a ham. 

I bought this impossibly cute jumpsuit in Paris, on a day when I chose to stroll around the shops of St Germain instead of going to the catacombs. Obviously shopping beats bones but also morning sickness and caves full of stinky of bones? No thank you. 

Second of all! I've decided to document our medication routine because I know that in a year or two or ten or when at some stage this routine looks so super easy, I will appreciate it. 

Every morning Dash and I hop out of bed and head to the kitchen. I plop him on this makeshift mat on the kitchen bench and listen to him cooing while I make a coffee and some breakfast cause lord knows I need it. I bribe the dogs out of bed with promises of breakfast and Dash's coos might start sounding like 'heeeyyyy' a funny little cry he reserves only for when he is getting hungry and thinking his mother is ignoring him. 

Once the dogs are fed and the coffee is made, I start pulling out his medications from the fridge, his spoon and container and syringes off the boon grass drying rack (hallelujah emoji) and the creon and salt from his lunch box. 

First we have the pentavite. Just .45ml of this multivitamin makes an enormous difference to our boy. Then we have .5ml of liquid vitamin E which is impossible to buy in any shops and therefore is a massive pain in the ass to find. But thank goodness for online supplement stores. Then we finish with 1.5ml of a preventative antibiotic which is a sickly sweet and crazy sticky pink liquid. I give him the antibiotic last because unlike with the supplements, he doesn't scrunch up his little face when I give it to him so I assume he thinks it tastes the best. 

By this point little Dash's 'Heeeyyyy' cries are getting more serious so I start the routine we do before every single feed. A little spoonful of pureed apple (on the smallest spoon I can find - for babies aged 4 months+), half a spoonful of creon (the spoons that come with the medication are about half the size of your pinky fingernail) and a sprinkle of salt. I mix it all up and spoon feed little Dash. Once it's all gone I can finally breastfeed and enjoy my now cold coffee... hahaha. 

The creon is a pancreatic enzyme that helps Dash's digestion. Without it, the fats and nutrients in the milk Dash gets goes straight through him. It's a tricky process to do before every feed but two week old Dash took to the apple straight away and we haven't looked back since. We're all so excited for him to start solids, he's going to be offered anything and everything.

At night, after his bubble bath and before his bedtime feed, Dash gets another 1.5ml of antibiotics and of course another dose of apple and Creon. 

People sometimes politely enquire about his routine. Does he sleep through the night? When is his morning nap? The usual new baby questions... My answer is always we don't have a routine yet, I still feed on demand during the day and he's worked out his own night time routine. We do however have to tick off a few things at certain times every day and his medication is just one part of that. 

I'll blog about the other things we do to combat his CF soon, I want to make a video of some of it cause daaaaang he's cute and again, future me will love it.