But At Least He Won't Have Rickets

On Saturday, we had a little minor emergency here.  Our pediatrician recommended that we give the babies vitamin D drops, because apparently some breastfed babies can get Rickets.  We consider it highly unlikely that our babies are going to get Rickets, considering that I have a good diet and we don't live in extreme northern latitude like Canada or Alaska.  Nevertheless, we decided to try to give them the vitamins.

I got Poly-Vi-Sol at Walmart.  We gave it to Vivienne and she didn't seem to love it, but she didn't spit it back out or throw it up.  However, when we gave it to Miles (even though we were only giving him 1/4 mils at a time), he basically started choking and stopped breathing for a few seconds.  He cried so hard that he got tears in his eyes.  I think the tears were mostly from the choking.  He just didn't know quite what to do with this new texture and flavor, even in a tiny dose.  Over the course of the next hour of so, he threw up twice (threw up, not spit up).  When he threw up, it literally shot out of his mouth and he started screaming and his eyes started watering.  It also came out his nose a little bit.  =(  This was not a fun day for us.  Of course, this also made me cry because I felt so bad for giving him something that caused this reaction.


We went and bought some D-Vi-Sol (like Poly-Vi-Sol, but just with Vitamin D), and they don't like that, either.  Vivienne threw it back up.  So now we've tried putting it in a bottle of expressed breast milk, and they will at least take that.

However, we're not very convinced that they need to take these vitamins at all, so we may decide not to give it to them.  I'm not sure whether I should be more concerned that they'll get Rickets or that we'll kill them by trying to give them these stupid vitamins.