Allie had crackly-paper amnesia, which I was not expecting but was grateful for. In the 6 month gap between her 18- and 12-month doctor visits, she’d stopped associating the crinkly wax paper sound with shots. She only had 1 shot anyway, a booster on her Hep-B (C?), and it came at the end, after the nurse had already applied the fluoride varnish on Allie’s teeth. Allie was busy licking her suddenly sweet teeth when the nurse told me to have her lean back on the exam bed. Hearing that, Allie laid back on her own while the nurse told me to hold her hands. I did, and told Allie to look in the mirror on the wall next to her. She turned to the mirror, and before she could blink, the nurse said, “Okay, the shot’s all done.” Whoa. Fastest shot in the west. Allie didn’t even flinch. She looked at me confused for a second, and I thought she may start crying, but she simply went back to licking her teeth and looking in the mirror.

Here are her stats:
Height: 92.5 cm (that’s 36.4 inches, or over 3 FEET!), 100th percentile per World Health Org (WHO) standards
Weight: 23.82 lbs, approximately 60th percentile per WHO
Head circumference: 46 cm, approx. 46th percentile per WHO

On the height percentile graph, Allie’s little “x” is so far up in the white space above the top 95th percentile line that if I were to estimate where the number would fall if the chart continued up, she’d be about the 150th percentile. There’s no such thing as being taller than 150% of girls her age, so I’ll just put it in perspective by telling you that Allie is 5 inches taller than a girl her age in the 50th percentile.

We had this appointment with a female pediatrician that we’d seen when Allie was a lot younger and we’d really liked. Somehow Kaiser shows her as Allie’s primary care physician and not the male doctor we’d interviewed and selected, but Mr. W encouraged me to make the appointment with this female doctor, hoping she’d be more punctual than my experiences with the male doctor. She was. She was also very enthusiastic and seemed very amazed and impressed by Allie. I think she may have been exaggerating her responses in an effort to encourage me to do the parenting that she wants me to do. For example…
Dr. H: *examining Allie’s teeth* She has all her teeth, and they look good. Have you started to brush her teeth, yet?
Me: Oh yeah; we’d been brushing her teeth for a year now, twice a day, and flossing at night.
Dr. H: Wait a minute, wait a minute…you’re FLOSSING her teeth? That’s INCREDIBLE!
Me: She really likes the children’s floss picks we got, and she gets to choose a color and she’ll even floss a bit herself before I take over. I swear I think those floss things are flavored because we have to hide them from her in the mornings or she’ll want to floss then, too.
– and later –
Dr. H: Is she saying more than 6 words?
Me: Yes, and she’s started putting 2-3 word sentences together now. Like “Mama, wa-wa, hold” when she wants me to hold her sippy cup for her, or “More peas, please,” “Broccoli hot.”
Dr. H: WAIT a minute…you’re telling me that not only is she eating her vegetables, but she can identify them AND she asks for more?!
Me: Yeah, she eats primarily veggies and fruits.
Dr. H: That’s AMAZING! I noticed you checked on the survey that you don’t feed her juice, desserts or sweets. That’s great!
Me: I figure she always ends her meals with fruit, so why give her fruit juice?
Dr. H: That’s exactly what we want her to do. We want her to EAT grapes, not drink grape juice.
– and later –
Dr. H: I’m going to put her on the ground and have you go across the room, and I’m going to watch her go to you. Call her over to you.
Me: Come here, Allie.
Dr. H: Oh, she’s RUNNING. That’s great. What other physical things is she doing?
Me: For the last month she’s been doing somersaults when we ask her to.
Dr. H: *eyes wide* Wait, actual somersaults? Is she leaning down and just imitating a somersault, or is she actually flipping over?
Me: She flips all the way over. Sometimes she looks to her side and it ends up being a side roll over her head, but usually she looks between her feet and flips a 360.
Dr. H: That’s AMAZING. She is VERY advanced. Kids this age will usually lean down and put their hands and head on the ground, but they don’t flip over, so even if she’s going sideways, it’s very, very advanced for her age. ConGRAtulations, mom!

Maybe I’m just skeptical on how impressed Dr. H seemed to be about everything because I follow Christi’s blog where she in detail tells about what her 2 tots are doing, and those kids were talking, eating well on their own, etc. way before Allie. Allie’s language skills seem to have only really blossomed this past month. Her spoken vocabulary is increasing exponentially and surprises us daily, like today, I sat her on my lap and we went through photos on the computer and she was able to answer my “who’s that,” “what’s that” questions by naming animals, vegetables, people, substances (bubbles, wa-wa, rock), and herself. “Who’s that?” “Ai-ee.” And as the photos went by, she got clearer with her enunciation of her name until it was “Ailee.” A new 3-syllable word this week is “bumblebee.” (She also calls gnats “bumblebee”.) Even tho it’s a big advancement for Allie, my parents also think she’s soooo delayed in her talking. They claim I was reciting memorized poetry in Chinese before I was 1. I’m skeptical and I think it was more like 2 and they remembered wrong. I AM impressed how on-pitch Allie is when she sings bars from the couple of songs that we know. The nurse who administered Allie’s fluoride and shot was impressed, too — all it took for the fluoride was for me to tell Allie to “go Aaah” and Allie opened her mouth obediently while the nurse brushed on the fluoride, exclaiming meanwhile that Allie IS very advanced. I asked if this is usually a difficult part of her job, and she said yes, and that kids usually cry and clench their mouth and she’d even been bitten before. Later as we got ready to exit the exam room, I overheard the nurse at the nurse’s station tell another nurse how Allie didn’t cry at the shot.

Later that day, Vicky came over and met Allie for the first time and hung out with us for about 5 hours. Allie was very angelic all evening, friendly with Vicky (who had bribed her with a giant balloon Elmo, which was waiting at the front door when Vicky rang the doorbell, such that when I asked Allie who was at the door, she answered, “Elmo!”), and just a happy kid in general. Vicky commented that Allie does everything we say. I hadn’t ever thought of it that way, but Vicky pointed out that when we tell Allie to stop and walk, she stops running immediately and walks, and we tell her to take something out of her mouth, and she does, and when Mr. W makes her stop shoving food in her mouth and slow down, she does, and when he asks to see inside her mouth before he allows her another piece of food, she opens her mouth for his inspection. But all my friends’ kids this age that I’ve observed are like this, too. With variety at the dinner table, Allie’s eating has gotten much better, and I’m happy. For example, today her dinner was brown rice mixed with quinoa and grilled fish pieces, with sides of baked yam, canned sweet peas, steamed carrots, steamed asparagus, steamed zucchini, and she ate it all. For dessert she had a smoothie made from fresh carrot, apple, rainbow chard, papaya, acai, banana, honeydew, banana, pineapple, loquats, assorted berries, plain Greek yogurt, guava juice and soy milk. She drank 5 ounces of it. Generally she’s a giggling, playful, silly machine running around full of joyful energy with a burgeoning imagination (today she pretended to feed her animal toys with her sippy cup).