Who's Counting?

During the first few years of a child's life, you spend a LOT of time visiting with their pediatrician. Even completely healthy babies get seen frequently for check-ups, vaccinations, and sick visits (even babies who stay home - have to build that immune system!). You become even closer to your pediatrician if your child has any kind of a medical issue whatsoever.

During each of these visits, as all parents can tell you, the baby is weighed and their length and head circumference is measured. These go on a chart as little dots and you have a brand new thing to stress about. Is my child's weight/height/head circumference normal? Is it too high? Too low? You leave the office in proud possession of their latest percentiles. Percentiles are rarely anything to be concerned about. If your child is in the third percentile, it just means that 97% of babies are bigger than him or her at this specific moment in time. It only becomes concerning when a baby doesn't follow their "curve." Emily, as I'm sure you can guess, tracks very low in her percentiles because she's a tiny little peanut. She is, however, on the full term growth charts as opposed to the preemie chart even though she was technically a preemie, so that's a tidbit to be excited about.

Nicholas tracks along his charts fairly well, with one exception. I'm sure you already know the exception is his head circumference. He was born with a head circumference of 46 cm. The "average" head circumference for a newborn is 36 cm, so you can see just how large his head was when he was born. He went as high as 47 cm while in the NICU, but some of that can be attributed to swelling after surgery along with human error (the nurses don't always place the tape measure in the exact same spot). Nicholas has always had a large head for his age and he's always been so far off the chart that it would be absurd to assign a percentile to his size. He's in the 175th percentile for age??? It's meaningless.

Obviously, unless the circumference shifted dramatically larger, his pediatrician was aware of his head circumference and was not overly concerned. The thought has always been that at some point, his body would catch up with his head and he'd start following along his growth curve.

Recently, he was seen for his 15 month (15 month????) check-up. He has recently made some significant leaps forward in his progress and we were excited to talk to his pediatrician about it. We've started adding real food to his formula diet. We're currently using fruit and vegetable purees and adding them to his formula and feeding it through his g-tube. We're still thinking that he'll eat by mouth one day (we don't know what day, but one day), and we'd like his body to be used to "real" food when it happens. His head size has also gotten smaller as I mentioned in a recent blog post. He's sitting up far more frequently and has started rolling over onto his belly and trying to push himself up into a crawling position.

While at the check-up, the standard measurements were completed. He's staying right on his growth curve for height and weight. And for the first time in his life, he is on the chart in head circumference. His body has finally started catching up with his head size. He's in the 97th percentile, true, but he's on the chart. It was really cool to finally see that dot fall in line with other babies his age. And it happened far sooner than we thought it would - we'd been told previously it would probably happen around age 2 or 3. Clearly this kid is an overachiever.