5-Year Checkup

Well, our big girl has been 5 for over a month, but the doctor we like her to see in our group is always backed up, so she had her checkup this past Wednesday.  She did amazingly well - no crying - and cooperated very well!  She started to get silly during the vision exam when they wanted her to cover one eye, and we had a hard time getting her to show us which ear heard the sounds during the hearing test, but otherwise she was perfect.  She is 45-3/4" tall (which is good to know for rides during our trip to DISNEY WORLD next month!), in the 94th percentile, and tips the scales at 44 pounds (73rd percentile).  Her BMI, which is still sad to me that they have to calculate that for kids now, is 14.8, in the 38th percentile.  So, as she's been her whole life, she continues to be tall and thin...and I continue to be jealous!  She passed her vision screen and 3D vision screen, and could hear the sounds on the hearing test, though we couldn't get her to show us which side they were on.  The doctor's exam was good, and she even asked him to look in her ears a second time!  The only tears came during shot time (she had to get 3 for kindergarten)...not for the shots, but when the nurses brought out the band-aids.  This girl does not like band-aids!  So they threw them away and she was fine.  We took too long to get to her gymnastics class, so she and I stopped for Frostys at Wendys as a little treat afterward.  Do not fret - she'll get to go to a make-up gymnastics class this Saturday morning.

Dr. Bowman was very impressed with her development and with what she's doing in preschool.  He said it shows that she's mastered the preschool curriculum because they are challenging her with kindergarten-type assignments and sending her to kindergarten class to visit.  She still struggles in some areas, and we are helping her with those at home, school, and at occupational therapy.  He thought that our current therapy schedule both in and out of school sounded good, and that in 2-3 years, she may graduate from OT and may need to switch to pragmatic speech (i.e. how to communicate, versus how to physically make sounds) and/or social skills groups (think Brick from "The Middle").  That goes right along with what we were thinking for the future.  He said we can stop giving her the iron supplement (which I had quit giving after she was sick at the end of October anyway because it tastes awful and we both needed a break after 3 years), and the magnesium supplement might be good to continue, but would be optional.  We really can't tell any correlation between those and her sleep, which they were originally started for.  He said to keep giving her the multivitamin with iron and to encourage iron-rich foods.  Good thing she likes red meat, because liver and spinach aren't happening here!  Her sleep is still a tough time for us, but he said if the melatonin spray is helping, and if we don't mind giving it to her when she wakes up in the middle of the night, that is actually not too bad.  Melantonin is a lot safer for kids than any other kind of sleep-inducing medications, so we feel comfortable giving her that and dealing with the wake-ups.

So, that's our big girl in a nutshell.  We are so very proud of her and cannot believe how far she has come in her short life.  We could not be more excited about her future.  She is really a wonderful big girl, and we love her so much!