We saw a pediatrician to discuss Little MPB’s speech and his ongoing cough (I’m not sure if I’ve mentioned his cough before – he’s been coughing randomly basically since he was born, but our GP has never found a cause or been concerned about it, but put it on the referral form because a second opinion is never a bad idea).

The Pediatrician did a full exam – a head to toe physical exam and asked about 3000 questions for Mr. MPB and I to answer while Little MPB played.  And the results were:

• According to our GP the word requirement for his age at the time of referral was 20 words.  According to her, the word requirement for his age at the time of referral was 10.  Little MPB had 18.  Now he has closer to 30 words, including two 2-word “sentences” of night-night and what’s that.  Now, if only my GP used the same metric she used!  She did indicate that by 2 years old he should have 50+ words and a few 2-word sentences and she gave us lots of resources to read to help us encourage further language development.  She then reiterated that we can self-refer for speech, if we want, but she really doesn’t think it’s necessary.  However, at 2 years old if he’s not at that 50 word mark then she will refer him because then speech therapy will get him government funding for pre-school.
  • As an aside, in our search for words that Little MPB uses we asked his daycare to keep track of his words.  Evidently he uses certain words at daycare that we never hear at home – he knows “Mine”, “Cracker”, and “Water” at daycare.  Which just made me laugh because at daycare he has to share with other kids, so of course he’s learned the word mine!  The director of the daycare indicated that the next words he’ll learn is “Share” and “Turn” to indicate sharing with others and my turn.
• At one point the pediatrician stated, and I quote I’ve never seen a kid do that before, he is such a boy! as he took a bell and started hitting it against every surface in the room until he found the loudest one.  At which time he continued to slam the bell against the metal repeatedly while smiling and laughing.  To which Mr. MPB just said, yup, this is just a typical day in his very active life!  While I was trying to wrestle the bell out of Little MPB’s hand so that we could continue the conversation without yelling.
• His ongoing, random cough is not a symptom of asthma or any health problem.  It’s just him clearing his throat.
• She cannot see the 2 year molars coming through yet.  But, normally you cannot see them until they erupt.  But, Mr. MPB and I know that we have started the 2 year molar misery and we are just hoping for Little MPB’s sake that they come through soon.  I miss my happy little boy who seems to have been replaced by a grouchy teething little bear.
• Little MPB’s dry skin is just dry skin (which we suspected).  But she did tell us that scoupable moisturizer is better for babies then pump moisturizers.  Time to go buy scoupable moisturizer.
• She asked if we’d been to the hospital at all with Little MPB.  To which we acknowledged his roseola ER visit, his maybe swallowed a magnet visit and embarrassingly admitted to the slightly pink eye visit.
• To answer one of her questions I casually said We know he has a family history of x.  To which she looked up and said, is he adopted?  Yes he is,  I just assumed it would be in the medical report.  Evidently it wasn’t and she had no idea.  She asked when we met him, to which I said within minutes of his birth and we’ve been together ever since.  She asked what we knew about his pregnancy, at which point I shared what we know.  She asked about his ethnicity/race, and took a guess on what it is based on his appearance, and she got it completely wrong, which once again proved my point about his potential racial make-up not being obvious.  She asked if we are tied into the local adoption community to which I said yes. And, that was that.  I will say, when it comes to Little MPB’s medical, it is the one time where we are very open about everything because in our opinion his doctors need to know details.
• His horrible ear bruise which he got the evening before the appointment and almost made me cry when I first saw it (he had a run in with the edge of the stairs on our deck) is just a bruise.  No need to worry, even though it looks absolutely horrible his ear will not fall off.

In the end, we learned that she thinks he is perfectly healthy, developmentally right where he should be and sees absolutely no reason to be concerned about anything.  Which has allowed me stop worrying, for now.  But I also know that soon enough I will be consumed with worry about something else that I just don’t know about yet.

We ended the appointment with her telling us to bring him back at 2 years old for another check-up, if we want.  Which of course we will do to keep our referral to active.

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