Healthy, Well-Fed Children

Last Thursday, Marty and I took the kids into the pediatrician - Elise for her three year wellness check up and Lucas for his nine month appointment. Where does the time go?! Elise weighed in at 32lbs and was 38 inches tall (75th percentile) and Lucas weighed in at 18lbs and was 28 inches long (25th percentile). I am not trying to be gender stereotyping here, but I do actually hope that Elise didn't get all the height genes while poor Lucas ends up being a shrimp. This world is not easy for short boys, especially when they have a tall sister! There are two other boys in his playgroup that are his age that are literally twice as big as he is (granted those are two really big boys). Anyway, our giant girl and tiny boy are perfectly healthy and did great during that hour+ visit to the doctor.

Lucas had to have his blood checked for lead, so he got to experience the infamous finger prick. As you may recall, when Elise had the test done, she was dubbed a "good bleeder" because she bled and bled all over me, the phlebotomist and herself and we left there looking like we'd just been to war. Lucas apparently has the opposite problem. She pricked his finger and then squeezed and squeezed for close to ten minutes trying to get blood out of there. He was not at all pleased, but recovered quickly. Elise also had to have some blood drawn, and similar to what happened at her two year check up, the phlebotomist missed her vein and had to try again. Seriously if you work in a pediatrician's office and your job is to draw blood from children WHY do you miss veins all the time? I understand that they're small veins, but common. They are all small. Elise was very brave, considering, and seemed to forget about the whole ordeal the second the stickers came out.
Our little daredevil
On Saturday, Marty and I made a last minute decision to take the kids out to dinner. This was actually our first attempt at going out to eat as a family of four and we were both pretty skeptical about the whole thing. Elise has an attention span of about 15 minutes and has never been particularly easy to take to restaurants, and Luke usually gets pretty tired and cranky around dinner time every day. Still, if you don't try, you don't know and frankly we felt like it was about time for us to leave our cocoon and join civilization. Turns out it was a great gamble! We chose a very kid-friendly local restaurant that had toys, little chairs and dairy-free things on the menu that Ellie can actually eat (although it annoys me to no end that restaurants don't typically offer vegetables for kids meals - seriously why do places assume that all children eat are chicken nuggets, hot dogs, pizza and fries?).

Elise chose to eat a hamburger, which turned out to be roughly the size of an actual cow. The thing was so massive she literally could not get her mouth around the whole thing to take a bite. That being said, she ate the ENTIRE thing - every single bite of this burger - which had to have been at least a quarter pound of beef. Then she also ate the broccoli and grapes that I brought along too (but then she didn't eat another bite of food for roughly 20 hours - she was still full well into lunch the next day). We all enjoyed our meals - including Lucas who seemed too distracted by all the action in the restaurant to act tired or cranky.

On Sunday we had another wonderful outing as a family. We went to a local park/playground and played for a while before setting up a little picnic in the park. It was probably the most gorgeous day of the year (it was probably in the upper 70's or low 80's with no humidity) and we all sat on the blanket, relaxing and enjoying yummy summer foods. It was one of the nicest moments we've had as a family to date! Next week, the Molloy family is packing up and heading to the beach for vacation where we will hopefully have lots of fun and relaxing outings similar to this one!