Nine Months, and the Koi Pond

I've been avoiding writing this blog post because most of this week is nothing that I really want to re-live again. Li turned nine months old on Tuesday. He's still teething, with the one tooth coming in pretty fast... he caught me on the cuticle of one finger the other day, right below the nail, hard enough to leave a good impression of what the tooth looks like. That's made him pretty miserable.

Tuesday, we had a doctor's appointment. Everything was going fine, until I laid him down on the exam table to take off his clothes so that they could weigh him. He started crying... the doctor came in, and he kept crying... he got his shot, and the crying escalated... and so on and so on until we'd gotten through everything and walked the parking lot for a while. Anyway, he's 17 lbs, 7 oz and 29 1/2 inches tall. His head is 19 inches around. Yes, Grandaunt Cheri, the doctor officially said this time that he had a big head. :) As the doc pointed out, there are good things and bad: the brain growth is pushing his skull out, which is good, but he's going to have a heck of a time getting shirts over his head and that big melon will be the first thing hitting the floor, tables, etc as he's learning to walk. Everything else looked good - the doctor didn't even seem bothered by the streaming tears and snot, which he attributed to stranger anxiety and is apparently normal for Li's age. He got his last Hep B shot, and they sent us upstairs to the lab for a blood draw. We registered (the woman kept looking at me like I must beat my kid, since he was crying even before he got stuck with a needle), and they had us wait until the person who does a lot of kids was available. She was pretty good, but unfortunately she went in on his arm first and couldn't get any blood in the tube, even though it had come up in the line... so then she had to prick his thumb and squeeze it out drop by drop into the tube. Li was pretty much beside himself by this time & had gone from crying to these awful little animal shrieks that were apparently designed to tear my heart out one piece at a time. We finally escaped to the parking lot and drove home. The little guy had an enormous bottle, and he took a long nap... at which point I took the opportunity to finally break down myself.

The next day, we went to visit Grandma & Grandpa P. The visit was fine (Li was the hit of the nursing home, racing up and down the halls), except Liam decided he didn't need an afternoon nap. By the time we left, he'd been up about 6 hours straight. The crying started about five minutes away from their house, and it kept going until about five minutes shy of the train station where we had to pick up Dad. Any nerves I had left from Tuesday were pretty much gone by the time we got home.

We had a couple nice days with just a little fussing, and then the rain started... now we're stuck inside with a pond forming in the backyard (I was trying to convince Andy that some koi would be nice, but no luck)... Liam has been walking around and around the first floor, and the cabin fever is starting to set in.

I love Li so much, and there are so many bright spots with him every day, but this was a rough week and I'm glad to move on to the next one.