Checking Up

Written by Pat on February 15th, 2009

On Wednesday, the babies had their four-month checkup. According to the doc, both babies are doing fine. Ella is quite the tall baby girl. She’s 25.5″ long and weighs 14 pounds, which puts her in the 90th percentile for height and right on average for weight. Jackson is 24″ and 15 pounds, which puts him right about average in both.

The only issue with the babies is with Jack’s head. He somehow ends up facing to his left whenever he sleeps, and his head is starting to get flat on one side. The doctor told us we need to prop him up so he sleeps facing to the right so that it evens out. If we can’t get him to stop sleeping on that side of his head he might have to start wearing a special “helmet” to help his head develop properly. Needless to say we’re doing everything we can to keep our boy out of a helmet. Of course, that’s easier said than done. For whatever reason Jack really wants to face to his left. We’ve gone into check on him in the middle of the night and found him propped facing to his right and somehow still looking the other way. I makes my neck hurt just looking at him. He’s getting better about not always facing left, so we’re hopeful we can avoid something like this (thanks to Shae for her awesome photoshop skills):


One thing we learned from our visit is that drooling is a developmental step. The doc was asking things like “are they tracking you with their eyes?” (yes), “do they go cross-eyed anymore?” (no), “are they drooling?” (yes…wait, what?). Apparently huge strings of spit coming out of the babies’ mouths is a good thing. Smiling, rolling over, crawling, etc. are the things I considered developmental steps. But drooling? Who knew? I guess instead of yelling “GROSS!!!” and passing the kids off to Shae I should have been giving them gold stars. It’s a little late now, but great work kids! Way to get spit everywhere. You’re really growing up fast. Yay.

That’s about it for our visit to the doc (other than another round of vaccinations which are no fun at all to watch), but of course a day after the kiddos visited the doctor they both came down with colds. They are not happy babies. They have sniffles and coughs and are crying a lot. They’re starting to get a little bit better, but it’s still frustrating that there’s nothing we can really do other than wipe their nose.

One last note on the babies: they’ve reached a stage in life where they actually want attention now. It used to be as long as we fed them and occasionally played with them they were fine. Now they have hissyfits if they get bored laying on the couch. Great. Now in addition to feeding, changing, and bathing them I have to actually pay attention to them too? This whole baby thing is turning out to be a lot of work.

Since Shae’s “People” has shattered our previous record of 3 comments, I thought I’d add a couple of questions/comments that somehow got left off of her list.

  • I actually mentioned this one in the comments to Shae’s post, but I can’t believe Shae forgot to mention people who argue with us when we tell them our babies aren’t identical. They’re a boy and a girl, and they don’t even look much like each other at all. One of these days I’m going to pull down some diapers and show one of these people just how un-identical my kids are. Even if we had two boys or two girls, why would you argue with a parent about whether their kids are identical twins?
  • Right after people ask the standard “are they twins?” and “a boy and a girl?” (or the similar “boys? girls?”), if they don’t follow up with “are they identical” they almost always go “Oh! That’s perfect! How lucky!”. This one always bothers me. What if we had two boys? Would these people just give a polite fake-smile and say something like “Oh…great” while secretly feeling sorry for us? This actually got a little awkward at the doctor’s office after our appointment on Wednesday. There was another couple there with a set of twin boys. Another mom was kind of talking to them and then saw us and did the “You have twins too? A boy and a girl? That’s perfect…” and trailing off when she remembered the other twin parents had two boys. I almost expected her to follow up with “But two boys is great too”, but instead she just kind of stopped talking and started paying attention to her kid.

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