Six-month Check-up

This morning we visited Dr. Baker for Cayden's six-month check-up. Chicken Wing was playful and happy through most of the visit, until the wait for the nurses to return with the shots got a little long.

The stats:
Weight: 21 pounds, 5 ounces (95th percentile)
Length: 28 inches (90th percentile)
Head Circ.: 17.5 inches (70th percentile)

At four months his head was measured at 18 inches, but the doc thinks it was probably just a generous measurement. It's doubtful his head shrank.

We asked a couple of questions about eye boogers and food.

Turns out Cayden's life-long crusty eye condition is normal, and sometimes it takes 9 to 12 months for a baby's tear ducts to regulate themselves to not produce nasty yellow and green eye snot. If his eyes are still full of boogers at a year, then we can explore a minor surgery to open up the tear ducts. They like to wait that long, because the baby has to be VERY still for the procedure, and they like to avoid general anesthesia.

As for food, Doc Baker says we're doing the right thing in continually trying to find a balance between satisfying the kid's seemingly insatiable appetite and not overfeeding him. Doc predicts Cayden's appetite will begin to self-regulate over the next six months, so that he's not gorging himself at the boob to the point of spitting up, and fussing everytime we reach the bottom of the food dish.

Oh, and when to introduce meat is up to us: if we want to puree cooked lamb or turkey now, we can; if we want to wait until he can handle texture in foods (avoiding the puree step), that's fine too. Early introduction of meats doesn't pose an allergy risk, but he doesn't need the meat from a nutritional standpoint. I may just wait until his pincer grasp develops --keeping Cayden on grains, fruits and veggies at mealtime -- and introduce meats when he can handle the bigger chunks. Saves some work.

We also got a prescription for flouride and a recommendation to take kiddo to the dentist somewhere between one and two years old. Hmmm, decidedly different advice from what my dentist told me -- that he should get his first check up as soon as the first tooth pops up.

Oh, and Dr. Baker had to pick a cat hair of Cayden's twink again at this visit. **blush**

Then came the shots. Yes, plural. Our schedule had him ready for Pentacel this time, but it turns out that since today is more than four weeks from his last dose of Prevnar, he could have that, too. He didn't have a reaction to either shot before, so I figured, heck, why not do both, to avoid a separate nurse visit for the second shot in February. So he ended up getting both shots, at the same time, from two different nurses, one in each thigh. And he DID. NOT. LIKE. THAT. And he let us know. Even after he nursed (with tears in his eyes), he started crying again as soon as I pulled him off the boob.

I don't know if his first really unhappy reaction to shots is because he's older and more aware, because he got two shots rather than one or some other reason. But I think I'm going back to avoiding multiple shots in one visit in the future. Not only was he upset, but then I got home I realized he got 455 mcg of aluminum at one time by combining the shots. But oh well; what's done is done, and millions of other babies survive multiple doses of aluminum (admittedly still a very small amount) at once.