I’m tired of the cold
I am soooo tired of winter, and soooo ready for spring. I think TT is probably good enough on her bike for us to go on a family bike ride somewhere. I’m thinking that’s the game plan for the first pretty weekend we get.
But first, before we can go out and play, I really should spend a weekend doing our taxes. I’m not sure if it will be this weekend or next weekend. I really don’t like doing taxes, but it’s that time of year.
I also need to sit down and make a new family calendar. The girls have so much going on over the next few months, it’s going to be crazy. And I’ve got so much going on right now that I’m a bit unorganized, which is not a good thing. So, this weekend I’ve definitely got to take care of that. And taxes. And my car really needs to be cleaned out.
It was my turn to take TT to her speech therapy today, and I just love watching her interact with the speech therapist. They have so much fun, and she talks so much better when she’s in there and her speech is the focus. Today when she went in there were words up on the magnetic easel, and as the speech therapist reached to take them down (TT uses pictures on the magnetic easel), my little Twinkletoes started reading off the top few lines on the board. The speech therapist looked at her, then looked at the window I was in (I know she couldn’t see me, but she apparently wanted me to see the look on her face) and then looked back at TT and and pointed to a sentence near the bottom and TT read it off, too. So today they used a mixture of printed words and pictures in their sentences, and TwinkleToes had a blast. They also worked on words that rhyme today, helping TT make the words sound different (Wayne walked down Blueberry Lane). She had a really hard time with that, but she’s such a trooper and she worked very hard at it.
In a few weeks Twinkletoes gets to spend a day with the kindergarten teacher she will have next year. Twinkletoes is beyond ready for kindergarten when it comes to the things she knows, but she’s so tiny, and with her speech issues, I just worry about her. But she’s going to have the best kindergarten teacher ever, so I know it will be okay. And she’s already reading, and some weeks learns GG’s spelling words before GG has them down pat. ( I should point out here that GlitterGirl is not in the least bit amused by this.) When I took TT to the doctor a few weeks ago for her physical to get her registered for kindergarten, and she saw a picture of the doctor in his office with his kids, she said “Ooooh, Pictures. P – I – C – T – U – R – E, Picture”. The doctor gave her quite a startled look and then proceeded to quiz her on some other things. He was suitably impressed.
Which brings me to TwinkleToes’ size. She is still not on the chart for her age. It isn’t that she’s in the first percentile, or the zero’ith percentile. She’s not even on the chart. But, she’s grown three inches and four pounds in the last 18 months (the last time he saw her), her blood work was perfect, and she’s obviously quite smart. So we aren’t worried about her size. He wants her to stay on whole milk, told her she should keep eating her vegetables, and that was that.
I’m starting to make plans for TT’s family day. Can you believe we’ve been home with her for almost three years now? She has come such a long ways in three years. I can’t imagine my life without this little spitfire in it. The baby who didn’t know how to smile now has a smile on her face more often than not. And she has this belly laugh that is just pure joy to hear. Everyone within hearing distance of one of her laughs gets a smile on their face.
March 5th, 2010 at 1:08 pm
I hear ya, RQ! I am tired of the cold too!! I just saw a tiny little green stalk come out of the ground the other day…daffodils sprouting change my mood to happy.
And my tiny Pre-Ker has now been home a year! She has gained 4 lbs and grown 4 inches in about 18 months too. Just now has made it on to the American charts for height in the 1 percentile! Yahoo! Probably won’t see the American charts in weight in the near future tho! She is beyond ready for Kindergarten in her mind. Her teachers believe so too. We simply can not believe the wonderful strides she has made in one year. If only the wait for her had gone so fast!
March 5th, 2010 at 1:20 pm
Your post is like warm sunshine on a cold winter day!
March 5th, 2010 at 2:28 pm
Intake of animal protein, expecially milk, is correlated with concentrations of growth hormones and height increases, so it sounds like you’re doing the right thing for her.
March 5th, 2010 at 2:41 pm
Not sure how you do your family calendar, but will offer up a suggestion. We use an online family calendar (used to be Yahoo, now using Google). We color-code each person’s commitments and can then toggle each family member on/off. The online feature is nice, because DH and I can each access it from work and have it at our virtual fingertips when booking our own appointments or appts for the kids. All the school events go on, even project due dates, etc. Now the DD1 is old enough to have her own email, she likes being able to sync her gmail calendar with the family one. It is accessible by my phone, so I can even check it when at the dr’s office when setting a new appt, or when another mom asks is DD is available for a playdate on such and such afternoon. Couldn’t live without it being online! (And you can print and hang up a copy on your fridge or bulletin board if you need to).
March 5th, 2010 at 5:39 pm
Wow RQ…your post about TT is soooo inspiring to me because my DD#2 is about a year behind her. She too needs speech therapy and is a smartie. She is also very small but growing fast. She started out at 5th percentile in height/weight for her age and has now progressed to be at 25th percentile. Sometimes I get so sad about all the health and development issues she faces but she is such a fighter. “Snow” comes out “No” and “blanket” comes out “chinchin.” Sometimes she gets so frustrated she just says “UHHHHHH” because no one can understand her. It must be so difficult to be that smart and yet not be able to express at the same level. We practice saying the alphabet every night and where to place her teeth and tongue. Very inspiring to know that progress comes eventually. Just like spring!
March 5th, 2010 at 6:25 pm
i have a tiny 7 yr. old. she’s 37 lbs (w/ clothes) and 43 in. tall. her 4 yr. old brother has outweighed her for a while and is only about an inch shorter. our pediatrician uses the chinese charts for her since she too doesn’t register on the american ones. she too is extremely smart tho doesn’t have speech issues like TT. our daughter has a big personality to make up for her tiny stature. i’m confident TT will do fine w/ such supportive parents as you both appear to be. stay on top of any concerns/issues that come up. as sad as it is, from my experience in working in schools, the squeaky wheel gets the oil. you don’t want to be labeled the “oh gosh here she comes again” mom, but you also don’t want to sit on your hands waiting for the school to fix whatever you feel needs fixing especially when it concerns your child. you have to be your child’s advocate.
March 6th, 2010 at 9:14 am
Yeah TT!!!!! Go get them girl!
March 6th, 2010 at 11:02 am
You are singing to the choir sister! I can’t wait to get the family out in the warm sunshine again! Clothes shopping for DD is really a mission for our family. She is going to be three in two weeks and wears size 12 to 18 months. We are still shopping in the baby department and she wants to wear the cute clothes in the toddler department which resemble her big sister’s clothes. Hopefully she will get to the toddler dept. by September when preschool starts otherwise I’m going to have to dust off the old sewing machine for alterations.
March 7th, 2010 at 2:00 am
Here in the southern hemisphere, I am sick of the heat, trying to get sunblock on the children every day, telling them to play in the shade. Bring on the cold snap any day and some rain please.
March 7th, 2010 at 6:36 am
I am on the same page as waiting for years – it rained for the first day in 3 weeks yesterday, the average summer temp. was 2 degrees above average, and I am really looking forward to more cooler weather like today’s……. :)
March 7th, 2010 at 2:41 pm
Just Awwwwwww
March 7th, 2010 at 11:21 pm
Okay, I may take some heat for this comment, but here goes. I’m an extremely short adult female. I’m probably as short as an adult female can be and still be considered of “normal” height — under 5 feet tall. It is not easy to be short. It wasn’t easy when I was a kid — you tend to attract a lot of negative attention, comments, questions, teasing, and of course you suffer in every gym class because you can’t throw/hit/kick/jump as well as the other kids. It gets a little easier when you’re an adult, because most of the time other adults aren’t giving you a hard time for being short. But it’s still difficult just making your way through a world that isn’t sized for you. Some days I am just exhausted from all the reaching, climbing, stretching, pushing, pulling, and all around extra effort required from a child-sized person in an adult-sized world. What I am trying to say is, if you have a child who is very small for his/her age, and there are possible medical remedies available for small stature, please work with your child’s physician to investigate them and, if it is deemed appropriate, take advantage of them. I wish my parents had investigated the possibility of dosing me with human growth hormone when I was still growing, but for whatever reason they didn’t (they were always very conservative when it came to medical intervention — I should have had surgery on a lazy eye when I was a baby and they opted against it, and today I’m virtually blind in one eye). Don’t listen to experts who claim that you’ll give the short child a complex if you pursue medical treatments to address short stature. They’ll get the complex anyway if you do nothing, but if you do something, you might give them a shot at a slightly less challenging life.
March 11th, 2010 at 5:02 pm
Thanks for your feedback, ruizhousmom. We brought our second daughter home just as she was about to turn 4. Now she is is just 6 and finally fitting into 3T clothing. She is 32 lbs and 36″. Like TT, nowhere near any chart for her age. They are projecting she will be 4’8″ as an adult.
One thing I learned was that the first 2 years, growth is based primarily on nutrition. After that, it is based on growth hormones. This means that first 2 year’s growth can not be made up later, if early nutrition was lacking.
We took our daughter to a pediatric endocronologist who ran a bunch of tests and a wrist x-ray to determine if there is any physical reason for lack of growth. The wrist x-ray will give a better answer of how tall she should be as an adult.
Regardless of physical cause of her short stature, the doctor indicated we may want to try to do something about it. Any adult under 5′ tall starts to run into life issues such as being able to reach the pedals in a car, having a driver’s seat pulled up so far that they are at risk of airbag injury due to being too close, etc.
I’ve been polling all the short people I know and general consensus is if it were them, they would investigate risks of any growth hormone treatment, but proceed if indicated to save their child from these issues.