Extra

Right before the Lone Star Baby started kindergarten, I weighed and measured her.  I remembered that my step dad, a family physician, always said that kids should be in the 40-40 Club, forty pounds and forty inches, by the time they start kindergarten.  The Lone Star Baby was over forty inches but she weighed only 36 pounds.  I called my step dad and told him she wasn't in the 40-40 Club.  He laughed and said she was perfect.  The summer before first grade, I weighed and measured her again.  She had grown taller but was still tipping the scales at 36 pounds and it sort of worried me that she hadn't gained a pound in a whole year.

Her tininess has lived in the back of my mind since her four-month doctor appointment when I found, much to my surprise, that my formerly "big" baby had dropped right off the growth charts.  I worried that she was starving herself at daycare, worried that there was something really wrong (but just a little - she seemed fine as long as she was with me).  Her doctor was good with "wait and see", thank heavens, although she was pretty adamant about getting some solids going at six months, even though most babies don't need more than a tiny bit of solid food for practice and iron that second half of the first year.  I tried to get my baby to eat solids but she was about as interested in them as she was in those bottles of expressed milk at daycare.  She really just wanted the good stuff - straight from the source.   To this day, she eats very sparingly indeed, and is way picky.

When she was a late walker (she would cruise, but would not let go - it seemed to be a balance issue), and had stayed off the growth charts for months, flat refusing the Pediasure I offered after she was a year old, my pediatrician sent us for all kinds of tests, but everything always came back normal and she was walking all over the place by sixteen months, so the doctor finally just accepted that she is a small person and we let it go.  Except you always think about things like that, in the back of your head, even when you know better.

I tried again with the Pediasure last summer after that weighing and she decided she liked it so I started giving her one serving of the stuff daily, more or less.  Within a few short months, she was up to 40 pounds, give or take a pound,  at last, but she still hasn't gained any more weight, and now she's almost 46 inches tall.  The other day, she chugged a bottle of Pediasure too fast and threw up.  I hope she doesn't stop drinking it now.  I'm still keeping her in the five-point harness in her car seat - the ones we've got are tested for up to 50 pounds in the harness and I think it may be a long, long while before we hit 50 pounds..