Family Friday: Children's Medicine

Something must have happened to children's medicine. Somewhere, someone must have decided that children don't need children's medicine - that they can take the same over-powered solid pills that adults take. Because that was what the doctor prescribed for Shawn this week for his ear infection. Shawn is a heavy for his age, but I don't think it's enough to require a level of antibiotic that gave me bad side effects as an adult. At 8 years old, Shawn is far from mastering swallowing a pill whole. That required me to grind the pill up into powder and mix it with applesauce and cinnamon. Of course, that just made the applesauce taste like medicine and not the other way around. The only way to get the pill down in a timely manner was for me to divide the lump of applesauce/medicine into a number of smaller, more manageable-looking lumps and get him to take them in succession. The advantage of this method was that I got to review fractions with Shawn at the same time that I got his medicine into him. It was an operation that took almost all my patience. But Shawn told me he loves me. It is these all-too-infrequent rewards that make the work of childcare worthwhile.