Baby fat

03/02/08 seven pounds eight ounces. At the time these were only numbers on a calendar and scale.

Toward the end of my hospital stay after Patience’s birth, I was told she was a little small but nothing to be worried about.

My regular family doctor retired a few months after Patience was born and her replacement is someone I’ve replaced. Before jumping her crazy ship she let me know Patience was under-height. Neither her father or me could be described as tall but apparently this was a concern. She was lame, OK, change doctors.

Then there was the woman who stopped me while I was taking fourteen-month-old Patience on a walk around the block, to tell me, that my kiddo was too small to be walking. You would think considering the circumstances of how we met would be concrete evidence against the statement. Ok, weird, keep walking.

My sister was in the grocery store with Patience and a fellow customer argued when my sister told her Patience’s age. Patience was too small to be the age my sister said apparently. What?

But then there’s the lady who told a baby Patience to stop eating her Arrowroot biscuit because she was already “too fat.” A the same time my ex mother-in-law thought I wasn’t feeding Patience enough, she was “too small.”

Had any of these people stopped to think that this child’s size would continually change, that she is a human like the rest of us and everyone is of different shapes and sizes at different ages? Or what about the fact that they were freaking this new mother out with their nonsense numbers?

My daughter was being attacked for her size from day one and there was nothing extraordinarily different about her body at any point. Do North Americans really need to worry about a female body at that young of an age?

My new and intelligent doctor says Patience is just fine in her physical development. She eats, she plays, she’s happy. Try those stats on for size and go away.