Katie's School of Hard Knocks

"It's a hard knock life for me..."

This week, life has been full of lessons learned the hard way.

Some of which, I refuse to learn.

For example, I hate mouth sweeps to remove foreign objects. But I refuse to see any connection between the mouth sweep and putting hairballs in my mouth.

Baby Amelia came this week, and we went to visit her in Spring two times. The first time, I wasn't allowed to see her (hospital rules). The second time, on the way there, I dropped my pacifier over the edge of my carseat right as we hit a cruising speed of 70 mph. Mommy said she couldn't stop on I10, Beltway 8, or I45 just to get a paci, so I was forced to cry the whole way to Spring. Sister Tenderheart didn't like it when I cried, so she screeched and screamed along with me. Out of sympathy. Mommy's ears are still ringing. (Mommy says there's a lesson in there about not dropping pacis over the edge. I say there's a lesson in there about giving the baby what she asks for...)

And would you believe, when we showed up in Spring, that baby got just as much attention as me. A middle child already!

AND, at my 9 month check up today, the doc ordered some tests to be run to make sure everything checks out ok. Apparently tiny children like me are a bit rare. I'm so small for my age that there isn't even a percentile to compare me with - they stop giving out numbers at 3% and I'm just "less than 3%".

So, they put a urine collector on me, sent me away to another whole office to give blood (4 vials!), and then expected me to pee. I wasn't gonna do it. So, Mommy drove around a while, waiting on my teetee. When I finally went, Mommy grabbed me out of the car, took me into the doctor's office, and told the lady she was ready to have my urine collected. Well, I wiggle and they take a long time, and the combination, despite Mommy's best efforts, meant no teetee in the bag by the time they brought me back. It was like a comedy of errors. The nurse, who could see Mommy's exasperation, squeezed urine droplets from the sponge part of the urine collector and every last drop from the bag, and made just enough teetee to be tested. With a huge sigh of relief, we were dismissed to go get Sister.

The doc says he suspects everything is A-OK, but needs to be thourough since I'm so small. We'll hear that everything is fine on Wednesday and I'll keep eating everything in sight. I bet if Mommy would stop mouth sweeping the hairballs, paper, and other things out of my mouth, I'd gain weight better.

Thank goodness Sister had her date night this week so I had an oasis of Nana and DD attention in the middle of my rough week. :)

CLICK HERE FOR PICTURES FROM THE WEEK

Love,
Katie "It's not as bad as I make it sound" McClinton