When I took her in for her four month check, she weighed right around 14 pounds, which meant she hadn't gained quite two pounds since her previous visit and she'd dropped below the fiftieth percentile on the WHO charts comparing her weight to that of other baby girls her age. She had grown a full two inches longer, though. Apparently all of her energy had gone into getting longer instead of getting chunkier. At four months, she was 25 inches long, which put her in about the 75th percentile for height. And, as is tradition for our long skinny babies, her head is gigantic. A circumference of 16.5" put her in the 85th percentile for that one. The nurse practitioner we saw that day was in 100% agreement with me that Bristol Margaret was about as perfect as a baby could be!
Seriously. A better baby would be hard to find. She fusses when she's hungry, poked in the eye by meddling two year olds, or sitting in a poopy diaper. All things that would (or do) make me crabby too. For most of the fourth month, she was sleeping 8-10 hours a night, sometimes closer to 12. I was almost afraid to admit it to some of my sleep-deprived friends, for fear they'd beat me up or toss flaming diapers of poo onto my front porch. In order not to jinx it, though, I always pointed out that I realized she was still very little and there would still be lots of circumstances that would interrupt this great sleep pattern.
Sure enough, at the end of January, the kids shared a cold with her. On that Friday night, must have been around the 24th, she had a terrible night. She struggled to breathe because of the congestion and she had a fever. Poor, sad, sick little baby. Of course, Saturday morning wasn't nearly as bad, but if I've learned anything in eight years of parenting, it's that they always perk up when the sun comes up and then they're miserable again by 10pm. By then, you're wishing you had just taken them in to the clinic at 2pm to make sure their ears and throat were clear, because now your only option is the ER and it isn't exactly an emergency. So, we went to an Acute Care clinic Saturday afternoon, where the doctor ordered a chest x-ray because her lungs sounded rattly. In an effort to avoid a panic attack at the thought of returning to the hospital with her, I texted friends to start praying! Fortunately, the haze in her right lung was not hospital-worthy, but they did give her both a diagnosis of bronchitis and a nebulizer treatment. She continued to get better from there.
Unfortunately, her sleep pattern never did quite recover. But who could stay mad when they stumble out of bed in the middle of the night to answer this sweet face?
(I guess, if you count being crabby during the day as "staying mad", then I could.)
1 comment:
so very true that they get worse at night!! hoping for an easy 5th :)
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