• Bug,  illos

    My Baby Has a Giant Head

    Baby Bug doesn’t really have a giant head. She has a very nice small round head. It’s just that sometimes when you go to the doctor and they tell you that your child is in the 10th percentile for weight, the 25th percentile for height and the 95th percentile for head circumference, you start to think crazy things. I’ve never really been very good at math, so in my wacky brain I’m imaging that she is very very skinny, she has a teeny tiny little body and a GIANT head. What’s up with that? Maybe I should tell the doctor that I just don’t want to know. Because if anybody is a worry wart, it’s me and I will worry myself silly over my baby’s size 95 head. See how I am? Size 95. Where did I get that?

    Baby Bug has a new doctor. We changed doctors. What an ordeal that was. Anybody ever tried to get records sent from one doctor’s office to another? You’d think they were still using the pony express or maybe carrier pigeons for how difficult and time consuming that whole process was.

    We switched because I didn’t really like her old pediatrician. It’s not that I’m picky about doctors (obviously) it’s just that well, he was the smiley type. At first I liked that about him because my OBGYN was not the smiley type and after nine months of doctor’s appointments that left me with that missing feeling, I was very happy for some cheery bedside manner. But then his smiles started to feel fake and patronizing. And after we asked about Baby Bug’s clogged tear duct for the fifth time and he started drawing over simplified pictures of eyeballs and talking to us like we were dense kindergardeners, I started to think I might find another doctor I liked better. Plus, the waiting room was always filled with very scary sick kids and the clerical staff wasn’t much better than the staff at the department of motor vehicles. I had lots of reasons to switch.

    Thankfully, I have good friends like whoorl who have connections in the medical world. Whoorl recommended a new doctor that I like very much. (Not counting the news about Baby Bug having a size 95 head of course.) The new doctor is so nice! She smiled just the right amount. The sincere kind of smiles. She gave us a prescription for Baby Bug’s infected eye before we even asked about it. She told us all about clogged tear ducts and all the different kinds of massage you can do to help speed up the unclogging process. (Something the old doctor didn’t say a peep about.) She told us how some people don’t agree on massaging methods and gave us her opinion. If Toby wasn’t so antsy to get going because he had work appointments, I could have hung out with her all day listening to her advice. But of course with talkative doctors comes long waits in the waiting room because they are always talking to the patient before you…so we were running a little late by the time we got to see our new wonderful doctor.

    The other advice the new doctor gave me is that I need to feed Baby Bug more fat. FAT. Ew! Babies need lots of fat apparently, especially underweight ones. I already give Baby Bug a lot of cheese and yogurt but the doctor said I need to give her more, and none of that non or low fat kind. She told me not to worry too much about Baby Bug being underweight, since both Toby and I are on the small side, but I still worry. I always worry! I guess I mostly worry about what I’m going to feed her all the time. I can’t let her fill up on empty calories because she needs every calorie she can get to count. She already keeps me hopping with her crazy demands for big people food. I try to save her bits and bites of things we eat but it’s still a big job for me to keep up with. Maybe I’ll have to start planning her meals when I plan our weekly meals. Yikes.

    So anyway, I guess I just want to say that I’m worried but I’m not worried or that I know I’m not supposed to worry but I worry just a little bit anyway. I mean, isn’t that what mom’s do? Toby says not to worry. He says that’s just how Ponnays are. They are just very “concentrated” in their small bodies.

  • Bad Mom,  Bug

    Toys toys everywhere…

    …and not a thing to play with. Hmmm… doesn’t really have the same ring as “Water water everywhere and not a drop to drink” but you know what I mean.

    So what do you think Baby Bug’s favorite toy is?

    a. her pink stuffed bunny
    b. the stuffed space gun that beeps when you push it’s fuzzy trigger button
    c. an old remote control
    d. mommy’s laptop

    If you answered “d”, you are correct. Baby Bug always wants to play with my laptop. She’s figured out that the silver toy that lights up and clicks is really really fun. Mommy is always playing with it, so it must be. Sometimes I put her in my lap and I try to type with her balancing between my arms. Before I know it, my sentences are in cap lock and there are giant spaces and numbers where there shouldn’t be. Two seconds after that, she’s pulled herself up on my desk and is trying to climb right up on top of the keyboard and into the screen. She is fascinated by it.

    I can’t totally blame her. I’m fascinated by it too. I think I went wrong when I showed her that it can play movies of puppies and babies laughing. She must think it’s the magic box. The problem is, it’s magic to me too.

    All day long I think about all the things I could make on my computer if I could just find a minute. This feeling reminds me of my old boss. He was really good at making funny voices. Out of nowhere he’d start talking with a lisp or ask for something sounding like Chubacca. He always had us rolling with laughter. One day I asked him where he came up with all these voices.

    “It’s like there’s a rave going on in my head,” he said. “All these crazy characters are jumping around and every once in a while one of them jumps to the top. That’s the voice that comes out.”

    I always think of that description. I think there’s a rave of creativity going on in my head. There are all kinds of designs and characters to illustrate that are just dying to get out but I have to keep a lid on them and pay attention to the baby because if I don’t, she will pull plugs out of the wall and suck on them. But I didn’t really come here to complain about that. Because very soon I am going to hire a babysitter and I will get four hours a week to do whatever I please with my laptop. Woo hoo! (Watch me do nothing but stare at it and miss Baby Bug.)

    What I came here to blog about was how funny it is that I can dump almost every single toy out of her toy box (it seemed like a fun idea at the time) and Baby Bug will not want to play with a single one of them. Even the sheer quantity didn’t amuse her.

    How did she get so many toys anyway? She’s not even one year old yet. It’s not like I’ve gone out and bought very many. I’m constantly thinking I need to get her new toys because the old toys are so boring but I don’t because I have no idea where to put them. I even discourage relatives from buying her toys. What a mean mom I am. Maybe I should start a storage system so that old toys can be stowed away for another day and become new again.

    Or… I could just give her my laptop.