genious mom moment

Evie has a cough. Again. I thought she was finally rid of it, but it came back with a vengeance. We're not really sure what is going on with her. She had a cough related to a cold late last fall, and the cough just lingered. It was sporadic, sometimes just once a day. But sometimes she'd cough when eating, or crying, or sleeping, and it was just sad.

The doc says there's no such thing as a chronic cough. I think. If she didn't say that exactly, what she meant was there's got to be a reason for the cough, that coughing is not normal behavior. We talked about the asthma possibility. I have asthma, and it gets worse with poor air quality, allergies, exercise, etc.

So anyway, we don't know why she's coughing. We're about to try an asthma controller medicine to see if that helps. She's also been telling me her head hurts, and she's been slightly congested (but so have I, and apparently Elm pollen counts are high right now?). So who knows.

I've been trying to do whatever I can think of to help my sweet girl, who coughed constantly from 5-6am this morning, and throughout the day and night. We run a humidifier in her room at night, and have air filters going in our house (one in her room, one on the main level). I have this magic cough drops my neighbor turned me onto: Onguard from doTerra. They are ridiculously expensive, but I swear if you have a cough, they are magic, and you won't cough as long as you suck on one of these bad boys.

So I thought I'd give Evie one of these cough drops, but there's a problem: she will just crunch it up. I broke one up and gave her some pieces, and she immediately chewed and swallowed them. So I had a genius idea.

I'd seen people make suckers out of Jolly Ranchers on Pinterest, so I thought I'd try the same thing with these cough drops. I tried using sucker molds, but I think I let them sit in the oven too long and the liquid cough drop just oozed out of the molds. I made it work by quickly picking them up and hand-molding the drop around the sucker stick while it was still moldable but not too hot to touch.

The result? They are not pretty, but they work! She likes them as much as Dumdums, and sucks on them for a good long while before crunching them to bits. And I'm hoping they'll help her get through whatever cough thing she's got going on.


Cough Drop Pops


Preheat oven to 275 degrees Fahrenheit. Line a baking sheet with aluminum foil, and spray lightly with cooking spray. Lay your cough drops of choice down, spaced a few inches apart (be sure to choose something that is safe for children). I baked mine with sticks, since I tried the sucker molds, but I'd recommend inserting sticks after baking.

Warm cough drops in oven for 8-10 minutes. You want them to be soft enough to shape around a sucker stick, but not to melt into one giant blob (speaking from experience here). Remove from oven and quickly mold around sucker sticks. Let them cool for about 5 minutes before popping into your poor toddler's mouth.

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