we're only days away from odin's 9 month birthday, which means it's time more his regularly scheduled 9 month checkup and his final rsv shot!

now, you might remember that his rsv shots are typically at the beginning of the month, but this one is on the last day of month and not even a full 30 days after his last shot ( it's usually best to separate the shots by almost exactly 30 days ). perhaps a random scheduling error? nope. medicaid will not reimburse for rsv shots given in april because it's the tail end of rsv season and their number crunchers have determined that it's more cost effective to pony up for the hospital bills of the kids that get rsv then it is to get everyone innoculated. so, cleverly, most pediatricians simply schedule an extra shot on the last day of the month.

but in much bigger [ ahem! ] news, you might have noticed that odin has gained almost a pound and a half since his last rsv shot! in less than a month! he's now just shy of 15 pounds.

some readers may be chuckling quietly to themselves, given the degree of hand wringing we engaged in after his developmental assessment when we learned that he might not have gained any weight at all. and we'll now fess up to the fact that after the appointment we started feeding odin a bottle of neosure a day, when we noticed that his diapers weren't as wet as we remembered; of course, we immediately jumped to the conclusion we were starving odin and lousy parents to boot for not noticing sooner that his diapers weren't sopping wet. hence the interim step of replacing one of his meals with formula, at least until we could talk more at length with the pediatrician.

i can only imagine what the pediatrician was thinking as he was forced to listen to us;

"and he hadn't gained any weight in two weeks and the developmental assessor thought he might need to be eating longer to get the "full course" and his diapers aren't sopping wet so surely we must have been starving him so now he's getting a bit of formula. because, well, starving him his not a good thing."

without nearly a hint of the patronizing tone that should have affected his voice, he proceeded to tell us that, in fact, after 3 or 4 months the wetness of a diaper is not a reliable indicator of how much nutrition a child is receiving; and that it's probably important to note that his last developmental assessment was performed by the person in charge of therapy for eating disorder in children born premature so she's constantly surrounded by the worst case scenarios and people tend to leave her assessments concerned about eating issues; and that sometimes kids just don't gain any weight and then they do; and while he didn't think the bottle of formula was doing any harm, he didn't think it was doing much good either, as it certainly wasn't responsible for his weight gain over the month.

pretty much, without actually doing it, he was shaking us by the shoulders, telling us to get ahold of ourselves.

heh.

and no, although it may look like it, odin is not sticking his fingers in his mouth and whistling at the nurse while he's being weighed.

and completely unrelatedly. hello to all you googlers coming to find useful information on rsv. i know that i'm clogging up the search results for rsv shot, but i'm not really sure that i'm the authoritative source to best answer your questions :-)

given odin's recent weight gains, he's forced to endure a greater volume of the monoclonal antibodies. this time the shot was a full CC which is quite a bit of fluid to be injecting under the skin and, although he gets over the surprise rather quickly, it's still rather sad to hear the lamentful cry that he cries during shots. it's quite different than any other cry - sort of a mixture of surprise, pain and anger.