What Happens at the Doctor's Office Stays at the Doctor's Office...

The Boy had his 4 year well-baby checkup (are they still called "well-baby" exams when they are four years old? Well-kid exam?) on Friday. He is still a little dude, but that comes as no great shock. The laugh of the day was when the nurse weighed him and told us he was 35 pounds. I looked at her, "That isn't possible."

"I'm pretty sure that's what the scale said, but let's have him jump back up there again to double check..." (The Boy walked back over and got back on the scale).

"He gets weight checks with his gastro doc about every three months and he was just weighed a couple of weeks ago and had barely broken 30 pounds. There is no way he is up 5 pounds since then," I explained to the nurse.

We both looked as the scale settled with The Boy standing on it and sure enough...35 pounds. No freakin' way!! I thought to myself. How is that possible?

The Boy jumps off the scale proclaiming himself to be "Big. HUGE!!!" And when he gets off the scale I glance up at it and after the nurse had slid the little marker things back down to zero it was apparent that the scale was not calibrated correctly. It was WAY off on zero. So she took him next door to weigh him on a different scale.

She came back in, "He weighs 30 pounds."

Yeah, that's what I thought.

And he is 37 inches tall. And lest you think I am living in the dark ages, I am fully aware that that is tiny for a four year old. But he has grown 3 inches in the past year and gained a few pounds, which is all normal. He continues to be about a year behind in his growth. We lost a year of growth between one and two when he just stopped all growing, but we have been moving since then. And considering his Mommy is only 5' 3", and donor Daddy likes to think he is 5' 8" but is really more like 5' 6" we aren't holding out hope for a basketball player.

He passed his hearing and vision tests with flying colors. Although we failed peeing in a cup because we had just peed before we left the house and "der nofing in der Mommy." So no pee for the doc. He could answer all the questions and hop on one foot and get himself dressed and do all the things he was supposed to do. And his doc was quite proud that he was graduating from speech therapy. He summed it up with, "well we are still dealing with our usual issues but other than that I think he is pretty fabulous." We think so too.

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So during his exam I was trying to hold The Girl on my lap. She has NO interest in sitting quietly anywhere these days so she was itching to get down. I put her on the floor where she happily crawled around and chewed on things that were probably filthy with all sorts of disgusting germs. Oh well, what can you do?

At some point during the exam she crawled over to the exam table and was holding onto the metal bars that hold it up and pulling up to a standing position. Well her little hands slipped and she CRACKED her face against the metal bar. I put "cracked" in caps because I seriously heard the crack. She started screaming one of those screams that has about a minute of silence in between the piercing screams. She was hurting poor little thing. It was a nasty fall. She hit her cheek bone and her face right against the metal pole when her hand slipped. Thank God we were sitting in the room with the doctor or he might have thought I had done something bad to my little precious. It took her a good 10 minutes to settle down, so I know she was in pain.

Poor sweetie has suffered her first injury. And after I gave her all the hugs and kisses I could muster, I immediately brought out the camera and tried to capture it on film. She has a nasty purple bruise on her left cheek where her dimple would be. Do you know how hard she had to hit that thing to get a bruise...on her cheek? Pretty damn hard. Of course I can't get the camera angle right and it doesn't look nearly as bad in the pictures as it does in person. Here was my first attempt. This was how she woke up from her nap later that day...
As you can tell in the above picture she was NOT happy that afternoon. I gave her Tylenol but I am sure it hurt like hell. She had no interest in eating solid foods (probably hurt to chew) and only wanted to nurse.

Since then she has been fine. But she looks like she was in a bar fight. When we went to the grocery store on Saturday the checker lady said, "Oh, she's so cute. How old is she?...Is there something on her...never mind." I said, "Her cheek? Yes. It's a bruise."

"Oh, I wasn't going to say anything because I didn't think a baby that little could get a bruise like that. So then I thought it was a birth mark and I didn't want to say anything about that either..." (stop yourself lady...)

"Yes, it's a bruise. And no, I didn't beat her. She fell against a metal pole in the pediatrician's office."

"Wow. That's pretty nasty. She must have really clocked it."

Thanks lady. Yes. Yes she did.

And that is the story of Peanut's first injury.
Again, the camera really doesn't do it justice. You'll just have to take my word for it. That happened on Friday and today, on Monday, she still has a purple and blue mark. Pretty impressive bruise for a first time. I can honestly tell you that The Boy has NEVER in his life had a bruise like that. Never. He doesn't do anything that might cause that sort of outcome. He is very practical and skeptical. But this one? She is fearless. I have a feeling this is just the very beginning of her bruises...