Kid Amnesiac

Four years and six weeks if you want to get technical on me. And please don’t. I felt guilty enough.  The primary causes of procrastination were: (1) not wanting to disrupt school or nap time; and (2) dreading the shots that accompany this visit. With babies, you don’t have to tell them before, and they don’t remember after. With a four-year-old, you have to prepare them and deal with the fact that they will likely cry and say things like “stop!” when you have more shots to go. I really, really hate needles.

Turns out, it wasn’t so bad. In fact, parts were pretty cool. This was certainly a “big boy” trip more than any other. It began with a hearing test. A pretty young nurse came out and called for Simon to follow her to “play a fun game and test your ears.” Simon has never been away from me at the doctor, but he does love a (pretty) young face, so he followed her with little hesitation. About 10-15 minutes later, he trotted back to the waiting area beaming and talking a mile a minute about “the fun game with the ear and the balls” and how he “put a ball in the ear when he heard a noise, and then took it out when it stopped.”

The results: Better than perfect hearing. Also above normal attention span; he did part of the test they don’t usually do for kids his age. This hearing result might just explain some of his extreme reactions to loud noises a year or so ago.

Next up, he walked down the hall to a nurse’s station to be measured and weighed. This was also new; we usually do weighing and measuring in the examining room.

• Height: 41 inches, 75^th percentile. Mamma genes happily quashed for now.
• Weight: 37 lbs. (Less if you subtract for the jeans, I helpfully pointed out to the nurse. It’s hard to break the habit of always trying to round down…) 46^th percentile. He’s filling out nicely.

Once in the examining room, they strapped on a blood pressure cuff. Also a first. The sight of the big black cuff on a tiny preschool arm made me laugh. His blood pressure is 90/52. I’ll trade with him when I’m 50 and my bad blood pressure genes kick in.

Then Dr. Abrams came in to look him over and ask him all sorts of questions. He drew an “O” for her, struggled a bit to make a “T” or cross (common for lefties, I was told), assured her that he always sat in his booster seat, and then lied through his teeth when asked about eating vegetables. The bad news: He doesn’t eat them. The good news:  He’s smart enough to figure out what the doctor wanted to hear and tell a convincing whopper. He also counted to ten (offering to do so in Spanish, too) and jabbered happily about school and his friend Baron.

But the real eyeball popper came when Dr. Abrams told Simon she needed to look inside his underwear for a minute. Just after she said that, a nurse interrupted the exam with a quick question. While Dr. Abrams stuck her head out the door, Simon looked at me and asked:

“Why does she want to look at my package?”

I blame Matt for that. Thank goodness Dr. Abrams didn’t hear!

Then we waited a bit longer, read some stories, and finally got four jabs on the arms. It was sucky, as expected. But once we got home and had a treat, it was put behind him if not entirely forgotten.

I am, as always after such visits, grateful to have access to such skilled and caring professionals.