You've come a long way, baby

Suzannah had her two-year well-baby checkup this morning. I realize these sorts of things are probably of no interest to anyone but me, but I am going to tell you about it anyway. First of all, she's grown -- she weighs about twenty-six pounds now (after hovering around 23-24 pounds for months), and she's 34 inches tall. That puts her right in the 50th percentile or so, which means...essentially nothing. She was always in the 90's, percentile-wise, as a baby, and then once she became more mobile she slimmed way down to the 20's. Now she's somewhere in the middle. Shrug.

She adores her pediatrician and wants nothing to do with the nurses -- that hasn't changed. As soon as the nurse enters the room, Suzannah begins to climb up my torso and wrap herself tightly around my neck and head, so my answers to their questions are muffled against her stomach. Today when I put her on the scale and stepped back, she wailed and held out her arms and generally acted as though I were forcing her to sit in a pile of fire ants, but the moment her doctor entered the room she was showing him her kitty and pointing out pictures in one of the books she'd found underneath the exam table.

Anyway, he told me she's perfect. I always sort of want to take him out for breakfast when he says things like that. And I also feel ridiculously proud that she's so healthy and happy, and the fact that I immediately wanted to call my husband and my mother and tell them how much she weighs and how tall she is as we drove home brings me to the realization that I'm probably going to become one of those parents who openly weeps when her child graduates from preschool. I could hardly make it through high school graduation this year, because I kept imagining my daughter up there, sixteen years from now. Have a baby, I've learned, and you will become all the things you used to make fun of. It's true.