birthday weigh in

Last week was the first time Quentin has been really sick, with a fever and everything.  Luckily it was a low grade fever and only lasted a day, but it was enough to put him out of commission.  It was pretty sad watching him just lay on the floor, especially on his birthday.  

Four or five months ago I was imagining his birthday being quite different.  I was hoping to throw a little party for him with all our friends, but instead he ended up throwing up at the pavilion at our apartment complex in Oklahoma.  I definitely had to readjust my expectations.  Luckily he felt better the next day and we had fun watching him shoving banana cake in his face.

While he was sick he pretty much on a liquid diet, namely breast milk.  He barely ate anything and since he started spitting out food it's impossible to get him to eat if he doesn't want to. Unfortunately the lack of appetite has continued this week and has gotten me a little worried.  Mostly because when we visited the pediatrician last week he weighed only 20.8 lbs (21st percentile).  This would mean that he lost weight from his 9 month weigh in when he was 21 lbs 4.5 oz (72nd percentile).  

Our scale is packed away in storage so we haven't been able to weigh him since we left Virginia, but I swear he was heavier.  I could barely carry him a few weeks ago.  I'm not sure what happened.  I know he's lost chub since he's been crawling, but he's definitely not skinny.  I've seen a lot of one-year-olds that were a lot smaller than Quentin.  Were they in the 11th percentile or what?  I want to re-weigh him.  We have to go back to get his immunizations next week because his fever had just broke the day before our visit so maybe we can check it out again.

The doctor also said that he should be eating what we eat so I've been trying to phase out baby food.  He has been eating at least half of what he was eating before and relying a lot on nursing, not what I was going for at his age.  So yesterday I got out our last bottle of baby food and he ate the whole thing.  I bought some more baby food today so he can eat food and we can start easing up on the nursing.  Since we're going to be moving in a month and half I've decided to wait until after we move to really focus on weaning, but I would like to move away from it.

I borrowed the new book "Bringing up Bebe" from my local library (another reason I like OK, I could never get a new book so fast at a library in Virginia) that discusses the French way of parenting.  It's pretty interesting.  The values of patience and being able to entertain themselves are very important to French parents.  

So far I like it and agree.  I don't know if these techniques have long term impact on the children and the way they turn out as adults, but it would make parenting more manageable and the kids would probably be happier since they wouldn't be throwing fits so much.  

It's different in France though because they seem to have an agreed upon way of parenting while in the US everyone has to have their own method. The expectations for children are generally the same so it's not like your kid's friend gets away with more and then your kid thinks it's ok.  It would make parenting easier if you didn't have to worry about making so many decisions about everything and everyone supported you and the way to raised your kids.  Parenting is a little intense in the US.

There are good things about the US and other countries too so it's probably best to read up on things and then take bits from here and there.