4 Years

Katherine had her 4 year old well visit. Even though she is the skinniest child I have seen and is shorter than most of her friends that are a year younger than her, she has actually gained in her growth percentages. Of course I can't find the paper with all of the exact numbers but I remember that she weighed 31 pounds (25%, up from 3%) and her height was 12%.

As a 4 year old she also got her blood pressure taken. Katherine has a toy doctor set so she knew exactly what this was.

She also had to do a urine test and she thought that was the silliest thing every. WHY in the world would you peepee in a cup and give it to someone. It was fun explaining the science lesson of how a doctor could tell if you were healthy inside by what comes outside.

I filled out her ASQ developmental questionnaire the night before. I always find those things so interesting. There are always some questions that amaze me that they are on there. And then there are some that I would have not thought she should be doing. For example, it asked if she could identify 5 colors and list 3 things in a category such as animals in a zoo. Those seemed easy. Then another question was if a child could list 4 of the following things first name, last name, home town, gender, age and phone number. I have not tried to teach her our phone number yet but she did know the rest.

Another thing we did this year was a hearing test. And, Katherine failed in both ears. After looking at her chart, Dr. H realized that she failed both ears last year and one ear at age 2. We discussed what this could mean. For one thing, since her birthday is in February, it will always come at a time where she is likely to have congestion. We felt that her speech was pretty articulate and did not indicate an actual hearing loss. She did not seem to have much fluid in her ears at this time.

I have a friend who is a Dr. of audiology who does home hearing tests. She came over to test both girls (Caroline failed at 18 months too but did have fluid at that time). It was very interesting and Katherine thought it was fun. She was able to do the entire adult test of pressing a button when she heard a beep and in repeating words when she heard them.

The result was that both girls have mild hearing loss in the middle ear. This is probably due to fluid in the middle ear but we will be referred to an ENT to see for sure why. Neither of the girls has had many ear infections so tubes are not really what I see in our future. Hopefully it is just that their hearing test was given when they have seasonal allergies and fluid in their ears.

I also ended up at the doctors office this week with Caroline. She has been having a rough time with sleep lately. She wakes up multiple times a night and pretty much just talks and yells for us. She is not really crying most of the time. I have let her cry and yell for a really long time hoping that she would give in and she does not. When I go to her, she wants to nurse and then she falls asleep. But, the moment I try to put her back in her crib, she wakes up, grabs me and says "no!". She even then will tell me to read or that she wants to eat. After a few days of this several people suggested that maybe she had an ear infection. One was even a friend who is in the medical field and she thought she had all the classic signs, especially since she was congested a week before.

So, we went to see the doctor. My intuition was that she is just a stubborn child but if she did in fact have an ear infection I thought I should know and treat it. Well, the ears were perfectly clear so I was right, I have a stubborn child who just wants to be with mom. So, this weekend we are having baby boot camp and letting her cry it out.