Doctor's reports

Thing One and Thing Two went to the doctors today. Thing Two has grown 7 centimeters since his birthday if you believe the ridiculous measurement they made last time and about 4 centimeters if you do not. This puts him in the bottom 3% in height for his age, but he is on the growth chart so they have laid off talking about hormone tests and bone scans and god knows what all. In other words, he is a regular sized child from my family's perspective.

Thing Two has also lost some weight in that time, though not much. Since he has been barfing on and off with the flu, I am not really surprised. Today however he is eating every two hours, enough for any six children put together, so I expect he weighed more at the end of the day than at its begining.

He happily built the tower of blocks he refused to build last time and then refused once more to do the eye test. They brought in about three nurses to try to talk him into it, and with every one little mister ham was having more and more fun. He was having a great time refusing to do the eye test. I tried to talk to him firmly and was immediately waved off with explanations about how he is far too young to be trying to distract them on purpose by showing how cleverly he can play with the educational toys and so on. Uh huh. Where have I heard this before? Could it have been when Thing One refused to take the eye test when he was three?

Is this a cultural faith or were my children just born with a very strong bloody mindedness gene? One of them is nice about it and the other one is not at all, but somehow they both end up getting out of whatever it is they don't want to do because they are too young to *not do it* on purpose.

Given my own history though (on both counts come to think of it), I am not willing to skip the eye test so we have to go back again in May.

Thing One was back to the dermatologist who said the rash is clearing up even though it still exists and then decided there is no problem. Thanks, doc, you're not the one whose kid now goes around telling everyone he sees that he has chicken pox. That makes sense to Thing One, so he has decided that is what it must be, in that five year old decisive way.

The bird came back from vacation today, dutifully de-bugged in the mean time. Hopefully this will not cause the rash to come back.