Giant baby gets a checkup

We went to the doctor a few days ago for Rosie’s ten-month well-baby visit. Who knew it would take 2½ hours?

The craziest thing about this visit was the 90 minutes we spent twiddling our thumbs in the examination room. It turned out that Dr. Minkus, bless his heart, sort of forgot about us and went to meet with other patients before us, out of turn. Oops! I guess this happens sometimes, and the girls toughed it out. Lucy had some fun drawing all over the paper on the examination table, and Rosie enjoyed repeated rounds of “This Is the Way the Lady Rides.”:/news/2008/this-is-the-way-the-lady-rides/ We were glad we remembered Rosie’s sleepsack so that she had a comfy lounge garment during the long wait. And I was glad that Jon was with us so I didn’t have to wrestle the giant baby for the whole time!

Since we didn’t plan on being out for 2½ hours, our schedules got thrown off a bit. We ended up eating lunch at 2:00 (drive-through McD’s at home, to save time and reward a very patient Lucy), and the last girl wasn’t down for her afternoon nap until 3:45 — fully two hours later than usual!

You’ll be glad to hear that Rosie is keeping up her super-duper “growth”:/news/2008/off-the-chart/ “trend”:/news/2008/100th-percentile/. This visit’s statistics:

_Weight:_ 24 lb 5 oz (97th percentile)
_Height:_ 31.5″ (99.9th percentile)
_Head circumference:_ 46 cm (88th percentile)

And how can one resist comparing the two sisters? At ten months, Rosie is taller than Lucy was at her fifteen-month appointment, and is just a pound shy of Lucy’s two-year-old weight. During our long wait, we checked Lucy’s height and weight, unofficially: 37″ and 29 lbs. We are just starting to move them both into size 5 diapers, although Rosie is really the one who seems extra-snug in the size 4s.

Rosie got a polio vaccination and took it like a champ — no crying at all! Lucy had a “no-tears vaccination”:/news/2007/tough-cookie/, too, as a baby, so we’re glad it’s a family trait. Lucy also enjoyed playing “vaccination” in the waiting room — she is just dying to get a real shot herself! Rosie did great for her blood test, too — sat patiently while the phlebotomist dug around in her arm with a needle, only crying a bit after she’d been poking around in there for more than a minute.

The other interesting news is that Dr. Minkus has cleared Rosie to eat pretty much anything, including egg whites and cow’s milk (which one usually waits until one year to eat). Rosie is enjoying her newfound freedom, gobbling up scrambled eggs and buttery toast. I still haven’t gotten to the store for whole milk, but I must say it will make things easier to not have to worry about pumping while I’m out. I have mixed feelings about giving her sugar — isn’t there something so special about having her birthday cake be her first real sweet treat? We’ll see where we land on that one. The next step is for Rosie to get some molars so we can start feeding her steak!