Wednesday 9 September 2009

growing boys

People have always said our boys are big, from about 28 weeks of pregnancy when people couldn't believe Tom was not ready to come out, from their nice respectable birthweights of 4.4kg and 3.6kg to now. They have always vaguely followed a line near the top of the centile charts. So what? you might ask, all sounds pretty normal?

We have just started using a new chart in Admissions, plotting childrens weight on a growth chart, in addition to just weighing them and documenting this for the purposes of surgery.

Today I admitted a lovely little boy, he didn't stop smiling, he showed me his toy car and let me have a look at his fingers which had suffered a burn and now wouldn't straighten. He let me take his blood, still smiling (despite nearly jumping out of his skin at the little prick) and then put his head on my lap when we prayed for him. When we weighed him, he weighed less than Joshua (at 2 1/2) did a couple of months ago. His notes said he was five years old at screening - we double-checked his age - he had turned six in July. I couldn't plot him on the graph, the lines were no where near.

It just makes you think.

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