bubby had his 18 month check up yesterday. hubby and i (mainly me) decided that this would be a good time to switch doctors. see, we never really LIKED his previous doc. don't get me wrong, she was a nice person, very concerned with her patients, and a very very capable doctor. she just wasn't... us. she was very caught up in 'milestones' and 'percentiles'.
with his previous doc each appointment was spent asking us if he could do certain things. seriously, she asked us at his 9 month well baby check if he could (and this is a direct quote) 'put a cube in a cup'. well, he's never really had the cube opportunity that apparently some babies have, but he has no problems putting a cup on his light saber to use it as a distance weapon. does that count? at his 15 month (his last with her) she spent the last portion of the appointment making me feel guilty because he was in the 20th percentile for weight. "are you feeding him enough?" "do you make sure he eats everything?" seriously i don't think she has her own kids, because a) you try getting a toddler to eat when he doesn't want to and b) yeah i'm not going to force food down his mouth and give him 'issues' for the rest of his life. and oh the passive-aggressive fliers. every appointment was punctuated with a forest of dead trees in the form of the 'what your baby needs to be doing' fliers. oh how i hated those.
but the worst was the formula.
you see, i had every intention of breast feeding. i wanted to breast feed. i NEEDED to breast feed. i needed that bond, that 'grrrrrrrrrrl' moment of being able to feed my son with nothing but what i came into the world with. i mean common, i'm so crafty I MAKE FOOD WITH MY BODY!!!! that's how i wanted to be. but about 7 years ago i got tired of constant back pain, never standing up strait, and migraines. so i had a breast reduction. at the time, i had no intention of ever having children, so the 50/50 chance of not being able to breast feed didnt' concern me. well, long story short, i'm the 50% that makes the successful 50% so awesome. i felt like a failure. but i have an incredible husband who held me through the tears and helped me get through it.
then bubby had feeding issues. first they thought he may be allergic to milk (not so), then they weren't sure, but the soy formula seemed to work. she finally determined that it was colic, which was what i'd been telling her the entire time. but at every appointment she would hand us a couple of cans of formula.
it was like a little knife in my heart, punctuating my failure as a mother.
i know she didn't mean it that way. and to be honest, we were grateful for them. we never budgeted for formula (intended to breast feed, remember?) and that stuff is expensive. even buying the generic stuff was costing us a couple hundred dollars a month.
so obviously that doctors ideals weren't in line with ours. so we switched. we saw Dr Finley at the Bellevue medical center yesterday. he was wonderful. great bedside manner, he allayed my fears about a specific medical condition i was very concerned about, and his style seemed very very in line with my parenting philosophy (especially in the area of 'not forcing him to eat' (and according to Dr F, Bubby's weight is just fine)). he even had someone come in and tell me that he was running late when he wasn't in the room at 2 on the dot. i was in awe.
and the best part? no passive-aggressive fliers or cans of formula on the way out.
with his previous doc each appointment was spent asking us if he could do certain things. seriously, she asked us at his 9 month well baby check if he could (and this is a direct quote) 'put a cube in a cup'. well, he's never really had the cube opportunity that apparently some babies have, but he has no problems putting a cup on his light saber to use it as a distance weapon. does that count? at his 15 month (his last with her) she spent the last portion of the appointment making me feel guilty because he was in the 20th percentile for weight. "are you feeding him enough?" "do you make sure he eats everything?" seriously i don't think she has her own kids, because a) you try getting a toddler to eat when he doesn't want to and b) yeah i'm not going to force food down his mouth and give him 'issues' for the rest of his life. and oh the passive-aggressive fliers. every appointment was punctuated with a forest of dead trees in the form of the 'what your baby needs to be doing' fliers. oh how i hated those.
but the worst was the formula.
you see, i had every intention of breast feeding. i wanted to breast feed. i NEEDED to breast feed. i needed that bond, that 'grrrrrrrrrrl' moment of being able to feed my son with nothing but what i came into the world with. i mean common, i'm so crafty I MAKE FOOD WITH MY BODY!!!! that's how i wanted to be. but about 7 years ago i got tired of constant back pain, never standing up strait, and migraines. so i had a breast reduction. at the time, i had no intention of ever having children, so the 50/50 chance of not being able to breast feed didnt' concern me. well, long story short, i'm the 50% that makes the successful 50% so awesome. i felt like a failure. but i have an incredible husband who held me through the tears and helped me get through it.
then bubby had feeding issues. first they thought he may be allergic to milk (not so), then they weren't sure, but the soy formula seemed to work. she finally determined that it was colic, which was what i'd been telling her the entire time. but at every appointment she would hand us a couple of cans of formula.
it was like a little knife in my heart, punctuating my failure as a mother.
i know she didn't mean it that way. and to be honest, we were grateful for them. we never budgeted for formula (intended to breast feed, remember?) and that stuff is expensive. even buying the generic stuff was costing us a couple hundred dollars a month.
so obviously that doctors ideals weren't in line with ours. so we switched. we saw Dr Finley at the Bellevue medical center yesterday. he was wonderful. great bedside manner, he allayed my fears about a specific medical condition i was very concerned about, and his style seemed very very in line with my parenting philosophy (especially in the area of 'not forcing him to eat' (and according to Dr F, Bubby's weight is just fine)). he even had someone come in and tell me that he was running late when he wasn't in the room at 2 on the dot. i was in awe.
and the best part? no passive-aggressive fliers or cans of formula on the way out.
aww sounds like you got an awesome doc. I had the same problems with my daughter cept they said she was eating to much, and it got to the point i yelled at the doc "i'm not gonna starve my kids because you think she should be stick thin. (btw for her height she was perfectly fine as well) we ended up going to a clinic of all places and found the most wonderful doctor there that actually listened when we wanted to say something.
ReplyDeleteDr F calmed my fears with Lu's weight, too. You've seen how Lu is just a tiny thing. Well, the other girls...weren't. LOL I had two very roly poly super fat babies. Reese is still my little wonderfully round toddler. A tiny baby is far out of my realm of experience. He listened to my rambling about all the failure to thrive and malnourished comments and all and said to ignore them. She was healthy and normal and nothing to worry about. Which I KNEW, but I needed to hear it from someone else, kwim?
ReplyDeleteDr F is awesome. <3