Prince Purplemouth

Thrush is a fun yeast infection that babies can get in their mouths. It creates white splotches on the tongue and/or inside of the cheeks/lips. Chickie has had it twice, and Zoodle has had it once...for the last 5 weeks or so.

Treating thrush can be tricky. The drug most commonly prescribed is Nystatin. It has a lot of sugar in it, though, and yeast feeds on sugar. So sometimes it doesn't work. Then there's gentian violet, a natural remedy which is highly effective in most cases, but stains the mouth dark purple. I recently heard of a third possibility, grapefruit seed extract (GSE), which has to be used more often than gentian violet, but is colorless.

So we've been using the GSE for five weeks. Problem is, I am not using it HOURLY during waking hours, as is required. That's hard! So we can't seem to zap the last little bit of the thrush.

Finally today, I gave in and used gentian violet.



My little Prince Purplemouth! Problem is, it stains saliva and spit-up purple, too, so now my lovely Miracle Blanket, the burp cloth, and Zoodle's new shirt (and probably soon my shirt) all have purple on them. I've heard Oxy Clean gets it out. We'll see.

This better work quickly, because I hate that my month-and-a-half old baby boy looks like I've been feeding him bright purple lollipops!!