Penny

Today, Penny is four months old, and today, she had her four-month checkup!

She is fine and fat and (aside from her cold) healthy, and the doctor thinks it is not too soon to try to introduce her to a little cereal.

Read on, for details no one cares about except us parents!

Her head circumference is at the 45th percentile, at 16 inches.
She's 24 inches long/tall - right at the 50th percentile.
And she weighs about 17 pounds (the 95th percentile).

The doctor says...

- Her weight percentile will probably even out some once she figures out rolling and crawling and becomes more mobile.
- She definitely does not have the flu, and we can expect her to have somewhere in the neighborhood of 6-8 colds over the winter, so to get used to that.
- We can start her on solids now. Especially since a little cereal might help with the diarrhea she's had for a few days now. (She also suggested bananas for the diarrhea, but the solids feeding schedule says not to introduce fruit until about 6 months, so we'll see how the rice works.)
- Not to worry about any of the development stuff we were mildly worried about, though we might consider putting her more often in the baby gym and/or exer-saucer thingy to encourage her to reach for things.

Then they gave her four shots, two in each thigh. Vaccinations. Whee...

This is the reason I took the day off from work - at her 2-month checkup, she spent the rest of the day after her vaccinations alternately screaming and sleeping. I figured I'd just take the day off to take care of her today.

So she cried, of course, when they gave her the shots, a little more desperately with each one. And then, against my expectation, she quieted almost immediately when I picked her up to comfort her. She cried again when we laid her down to put her clothes back on, but quieted again when Matt picked her back up. We gave her a squirt of baby Tylenol to help with the pain, and it started to work its magic on the drive home - she fell asleep before we'd gone a mile.

So we'll see how today goes. She's sleeping peacefully in her bassinet now, but whether the pain of the shots will have passed by the time she wakes up is a question I can't answer.

Wish me luck...