Somebody please think of the children!

Yesterday, Harrison had his nine-month well-baby visit with the pediatrician. His checkups always start out with a visit from the nurse. We’re asked to strip him down completely (read: no diaper) before placing him on the scale. This is always a bit daunting, especially since at a prior visit he peed all over the wall, Kleenex box, paper towels, and sink. No golden showers this time, and Harrison continued to place in the featherweight class: 18 pounds, 6 ounces and 27 inches long--somewhere around the 20th percentile. His head circumference, though, continues to push the 70th percentile.*

My son is a Bobblehead.

The next part of the exam consists of a Q&A: how much does he sleep/eat/poop; is he crawling/talking/standing/waving etc.--all the standard questions to determine whether Harrison is developing normally. She then asked us if we have a car seat and whether or not we read to him. This probably strikes you as odd, right? And troubling that apparently there are some people out there who have been driving around for nine months with their infants loose in the car? And parents who don’t read to their babies?

The advice to play, sing, talk, and read to your baby is everywhere. It comes in the mail as part of promotional materials with baby merchandise: “Babies need stimulation: Buy this Fisher-Price hunk of plastic! Talk to your baby!” It’s on the leaflets that the pediatrician hands out: “Things to do with your 6-month old: Play with your baby. Hold your baby.” Seriously. Does this mean that I could have skipped the playing and the holding in months 0-5? There’s also a new public service announcement campaign in Rochester that shows real mothers singing, cooing, and dancing with their infants: “Babies minds don’t develop on their own. Play with your baby,” the voiceover says.

My grandmother once advocated that people should have to successfully raise and train a dog before they could apply for a childbearing license. I think she was on to something…

* That should explain the difficulty I had pushing him out. Speaking of pushing, a coworker-friend’s sister just had a baby last week and broke her tailbone during labor. Apparently, this is a freak occurrence, but it also happened to her other sister a few years earlier. Needless to say, my coworker, who has yet to have children, is a bit worried that there’s some mutant weak-tailbone gene in her family.