Oh-so proud

I mentioned in my intro post that I have a family. A1 is my endlessly-patient husband who puts up with all of my crazy. Bug is our 16-month-old daughter, who seems to have inherited a great deal of my crazy. Here's a recent photo of the two of them:


Now, if you know anything about babies, you might be thinking to yourself, she looks a little on the small side for a 16-month-old. You'd be right for two reasons. One, she's 13-months-old there (I may have exaggerated the recent thing a little). Two, she is very small.

For at least half of her life at this point, we've been concerned about Lea's size. She's fallen off the growth chart a few times, wears a size considerably smaller than her age would suggest and I have to feed her like I'm the witch fattening up Hansel for Christmas dinner with my coven.

At almost 16-months, she weights a whopping 18 pounds, 5 ounces. That puts her in the first percentile on the growth chart but it's almost 3 pounds heavier than she was 2 months ago, so we're pleased.

While we were at the GI specialist's office last week, Lea showed off one of her current favorite skills. We stripped her down to her bare bottom for the weighing, then sat her on the scale to see what the verdict would be. The scale reads out in something else and then we check the conversion chart because, well, I'm a journalist and he's a social studies teacher - we don't know math.

Every time we do this little ritual of ours, I catch myself holding my breath. Despite the fact that they know we feed our kid and she's clean, happy and (otherwise) healthy, I'm always afraid children's services is going to show up to make sure we aren't starving her.

This time, when the scale gave us our judgment, and we all looked to the conversion chart, it was happy news.

And our happy baby, sitting buck-naked on a piece of paper on a scale, clapped. That's right, she clapped for her own weight gain, smiling proudly at us.

This is one of Lea's new favorite habits. She also claps when one of us walks in the door and when we go to wake her up in the mornings or get her up from a nap. But most of all, she loves clapping for herself, and loves even more to clap for herself while saying "AAAAA ee-yuh" (translation: Yay Lea!).

Obviously, sharing a BMI with supermodels is doing a lot for her self-esteem.