What if I forget my baby's vitamin D or iron drops?

Missing a dose

There was a period where we were in survival mode, and we simply forgot the vitamin D drops for a stretch. By the time we noticed, the question in our heads was how much damage we had done.

The honest answer: very little. Vitamin D works on stores built over weeks and months, not day to day. A gap of days, or even a couple of weeks, is made up by starting again — not by making up the arithmetic.

This is the one real mistake available here. Missing five days and then giving a larger dose to catch up is worse than missing five days.

Vitamin D and iron are both things where too much matters. With iron in particular, an excess is taken seriously — it is one of the more common causes of accidental overdose in small children, which is why prescriptions are weight-based and the bottle comes with its own syringe.

Never double up

We had an episode where we thought Ari might have had more iron than she should, and she was sick afterwards. What we got right was ringing straight away rather than watching to see what happened.

That is the correct instinct and worth stating plainly: a possible overdose of iron is a call now, with the bottle in your hand so you can read out the strength and the dose. Not a search, not a wait-and-see, not a morning call. Vomiting after too much iron is a reason to be on the phone, not a reason to assume it has sorted itself out.

We asked whether vitamin D and iron needed to be given separately or whether one interfered with the other, because we were guessing at it daily.

This depends on what your baby has been prescribed, so ask rather than guessing. We gave vitamin D before her milk. We were told to wait about 40 minutes after the feed before giving iron because milk could affect how it was absorbed. That was Ari's plan; follow the instructions for your own baby. Giving each one at the same point every day also turned it into a habit rather than another decision.

One simple system

With a night nurse, a grandparent or two parents on shifts, the real risk is not the missed dose. It is the dose given twice because nobody wrote it down.

We ended up with a note where the bottles lived, with the date ticked off. Unglamorous, and it removed an entire category of argument at 7am.