Wednesday, November 2, 2011

6 month appointment

On Monday (October 31st) Callan went in for his 6 month well baby visit. Officially 6 months, 9 days old Callan aced the visit with flying colors. After months of being off of it, he finally made it onto the height and weight chart! At 21 pounds, 29 inches and a head circumference of 17.5 inches, he is in the 90th percentile for weight, >95th percentile for length and 60th percentile for head. He is growing bigger and stronger each day. He had another round of vaccines and his first flu shot. In previous appointments it seemed like he was bothered by the shots and needed more cuddles and nursing time, but this time he handled it like a champ and so far has not been affected.
I will say that we did have a bit of an interesting doctor's appointment. Our pediatrician that we had been seeing is gone so we were with a new doctor and I don't think our philosophies really meshed. Granted, I realize he's a board certified doctor and went to medical school, etc, so he is probably much smarter than I am, but for certain things I'm not sure I can take his word as gospel. Huge and I discussed it and we agree that we don't think this doctor is for us, but we will continue to go to the practice as we love everything else about it. Although I won't go into specifics, there was a bit of fear mongering that occurred and this particular doctor definitely saw things more in black and white/right and wrong and for certain things he wanted to let us know we were wrong. I know that we're not perfect parents and this is more than just that knee-jerk reaction you get when you're being attacked... he pretty much wanted to let us know that we were inadvertently poisoning our child by letting him chew on things not meant for babies, that we were weak because we were letting him call the shots by allowing him to eat in the middle of the night (this might be true) and that we are depriving him of nutrition/vitamins by skipping iron fortified cereals and doing baby led weaning (an approach to solids that many doctors do not seem to agree with). I will say he convinced us to get more iron into Callan's diet as he is anemic (makes sense since mom is too -although after doing some research after we left, Callan's numbers are almost normal), but his bedside manner could use some work! We had heard from others that you either love or hate this doctor and although I won't say we hate him, we just don't love him like we did our last. We have another appointment in a month with the same doctor so Callan can get the second round of the flu shot and the other vaccines (they split the 6 month vaccines since there are so many), but his next well baby visit at 9 months will be with another doctor. (Although now that I've had some time to think about it, this doctor wasn't so bad... maybe we'll go back. I just remember being pretty upset at the appointment... now, not so much. Maybe I just have a bad memory?)


Callan seems skeptical of mama's memory too...

Clearly Callan is a healthy, happy little boy and no doctor is going to tell me otherwise!

2 comments:

  1. Ok, I'm a night owl (probably with DSPS) and I have a hard time understanding the no feeding during the night thing. People eventually fall into their own biorhythm, so what's the risk of midnight feedings? I say this from the perspective of somebody who spent her whole life forced to conform to a regular person's schedule when really my biorhythm is just different. Why do babies need a distinct day and night other than for the parents' convenience?

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  2. Go w/your gut. It sounds like you don't want to be paranoid about the doctor and you know some 'medicine' is hard to swallow, but I say listen to your gut. It's one thing to not like the message and another to not like the messenger. Make sure you like the messenger. At least that's how I feel about physicians. If I don't like them, I usually don't trust their advice.

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