weight gain

When Chloe was born she was a normal-sized infant, seven pounds, four ounces. She was adorable. Her birth was easy. Everything was completely normal.

She had lost a normal amount of weight at her first week well-baby checkup, as much as any baby loses in the first week of post-birth life when they're learning to nurse and clearing meconium out of their systems.

At three months, she was still on the growth chart. At six months, she was starting to drop off. At nine months, she finally doubled her birth weight. At one year, she was not quite seventeen pounds.

The growth-charts, as they are now, recommend that babies double their birth weight by six months and triple it by twelve months, so she should have been fourteen pounds at six months and twenty-one pounds at a year.

I worried excessively about these numbers. I never did with Andrew, our three-year old, because, well, he was always a chubby munchkin.

Our pediatrician kept reassuring me that breast-fed babies, as Chloe exclusively was for the first six or seven months, grow more slowly than formula fed babies. In fact, most formula fed babies that I'd seen seemed overly fat and chubby. Chloe didn't seem fat, but she wasn't scrawny.

In the back of my mind I kept getting more and more concerned, despite our doctor's reassurance. Tiny herself, our doctor would say, "but these charts are based on formula-fed babies and I'm not concerned at all, she's developing normally."

Of course she was, and I celebrated every little milestone--the rolling, the sitting, the pulling up.

But I couldn't shake the doubts in the back of my mind.

An aquaintaince suggested a vitamin D deficiency, which is often undiagnosed in infants because the only symptom may be slow weight gain. I thought about how she had gone straight from her dark bedroom to her dark caregiver's house all winter long.

My mother suggested that she was just taking after me, who weighed 23 pounds at age 2. I thought about how Chloe wasn't on track to make even that.

My husband said not to worry about it. He thought it had to do with her body not being able to process the dairy in the breast milk, and therefore not getting all the nutrients from it. I worried about how much nutrition she actually was getting.

The doubts and worries in the back of my mind grew to a disproportionate size, and it was preventing me from scheduling her 1-year checkup because I didn't want to know what she weighed. I was in denial.

I finally took her in at 13 months and scheduled her with a different doctor.

That visit was an utter disaster, and taught me a valuable lesson about following my mommy-instincts.