a well child

Since A and I will be in Eldo all of next week to help prepare things for Auntie L's wedding, I scheduled his 18 month well-child visit for this morning at Baylor Pediatric Center, basically to get a tune-up before I take him on the road. This was our first experience at the center, and it was a good one. I was relieved to see a separate "well kid" waiting room with nice, clean furniture and toys, new TV's playing classic cartoons, and a gorgeous fish tank with very entertaining fish, all the more appreciated when I had to fill out a phonebook's worth of new patient paperwork and couldn't amuse Alex myself.

Once I finished the paperwork, we got called in (right on time, I might add), answered the customary health and development questions, and got his vitals. The nurse was a doll and A didn't fail to notice. And here are the much-anticipated measurements:

head circumference - 19 in (65%)
height - 34 in (91%)
weight - 26.1 lbs. (55%)
bmi - 15.9

Yeah, you read that right! They do a body mass index for 18 month olds. Crazy, huh? I guess it is Texas, home of the "big-boneded". A score of 15.9 puts him in the 28th percentile, which is pretty arbitrary considering "healthy" is anywhere between 5 and 85%. The important thing is that he is a very well child according to the doc, who used the word "perfect" about five or six times whe referring to his health and development. Of course, it helped that he was a complete goofball with the doc, who said that he certainly acted like a healthy, happy boy. That's a good thing for a mom to hear from a doc, I'd say. Yay for being blessed with such a wonderful little boy.