Elliott: Two Months!

COULD SOMEBODY PLEASE TELL ME HOW ELLIOTT COULD POSSIBLY BE TWO MONTHS OLD ALREADY???

Mom, I don't fit in this NB outfit anymore!

Well, regardless of how it happened, it happened. This little guy went into the doctor's office yesterday for his two month appointment! He seems so much longer and leaner than Nory, but when I compared the stats to hers, he was pretty much the same (he is slightly longer). I guess he won't be our basketball star, after all!

10lb 5oz (25th%)

22 inches (25th %)

He also got a shot: DTaP*, which he handled fine except for having a particularly fussy night. Elliott got a glowing health review.

I am enjoying this child more and more. Of course I loved him from the moment I saw those two lines on the pregnancy test, but these first two months were a lot rougher than I expected. However, he is slowly moving from being a very difficult infant towards a rather happy and darling baby. He has started smiling all the time when you talk to him, which brings out a lot of his personality. He still isn't sleeping very well, but at least he has long periods of happy wakefulness where he will interact with Daddy or Nory or me.  

Check out all that hair! Nory's was long gone by 2 months.

*In case you were thinking, "but wait, there's more!", my philosophy on vaccinations is different than the average mom's. I am all for vaccinations, don't get me wrong, but the American Academy of Pediatrics recommended schedule is basically aimed at getting as many vaccines as possible in the shortest amount of time because they are afraid that parents won't continue vaccinations as their child grows. They want you to give your baby Hep B in the hospital for goodness sake, Hep B, which is a sexually transmitted disease. So by following that schedule, you end up with itty bitty teeny tiny babies' bodies being asked to create antibodies for a lot more than should be necessary. Anyway, our technique, loosely based on the Dr. Sear's Vaccine Book, but taking into account our pediatrician's advice, is to give only the shots necessary in the first year for diseases which are high risk for babies, and then to catch up after that, once a child's body is a little bigger and more capable of handling the vaccines. We also like to spread them out so we go in an extra time between normal wellness checks for vaccine-only appointments. Nory is pretty much caught up now, she will be totally caught up by age 3. So anyway, we discussed with our doctor what she considered to be the most important vaccine for infants and we decided on DTaP. Next month we will do HIB and (probably) Rotavirus.

Plus it was kinda fun giving Elliott a Polio vaccine since Dan's company works a lot on Polio. He got to have a show-and-tell moment yesterday.