October 23, 2000 - Monday
A second tooth is starting to poke through Harry's lower gum and one on the top is now visible through an increasingly thin layer of gum tissue. Since we live in a house that consumes well water, we now need to start giving Harry a fluoride supplement to help those new teeth become strong. I remember taking little pink fluoride pills for years as a kid, but for babies the solution seems to come in the form of a rust-colored liquid to be administered with a syringe.

We actually started with the fluoride a few weeks ago, but we quickly abandoned it in favor of another syringe-dealt medicine for Harry's ear infection. Harry did not at all enjoy having substances injected into his mouth and once a day was still enough. Fortunately, we got lucky with the ear medicine and discovered it was sweet enough for Harry to just eat from a spoon. But, now that the ear medicine is now finished - his ear problem has apparently, and thankfully, gone away - we need to get back to the fluoride and it tastes bad. Harry just expels it with his tongue if he has the chance and that's the clear reason for the syringe, but there's nothing in a habit of sticking something awful into a screaming baby's mouth everyday for the next several months or years that I find at all appealing or that ultimately makes much sense. We have to find another way.

Tonight we tried mixing a little of the fluoride potion in with some fresh applesauce with partial success. Harry likes applesauce and we teased him first with a couple straight spoonfuls. When we added a small amount of rusty stuff to the applesauce, Harry surprisingly did not spit it out. He did, however, very amusingly stop all his other bodily motions and shook his head side to side with a hilarious stuttering shiver sound that clearly connoted that something both surprised him and wasn't quite right.

It took four spoonfuls of the applesauce fluoride combination to finish the proper dose and we mixed at least a couple of spoonfuls of straight applesauce between each. But each time we tried to slip in the fluoride, Harry had the same reaction. It was very funny and his mother and I both laughed audibly each time. Unfortunately, humorous as it may have been, it doesn't seem like a solution for the next few hundred evenings of Harry's life. We'll keep experimenting.


Comments, opinions?