Temporary Shower

Dear Caila bear, You are almost 9 month old now. In the last few months you have grown a lot. You are now 22lbs and 99 th percentile for weight. You know how to crawl though you drag one leg like your cousin Avery. You especially like to stand and will climb on anything you can. It seems like you are so eager to move sniff sniff. I love this age! I love that you can play by yourself and I especially love that I am your favorite person. When I walk into the room, you always just want me to hold you and I am ok with that. Someday you won’t want to snuggle anymore so I will take all the snuggles I can get. Going back to school has been hard but I know you are well taken care of. You light up when you see your cousins and you love being mischievous with them. At Auntie A’s, there is a walker that you sit in and I am amazing you can navigate everywhere in it. You truly are getting smarter and smarter every day. About 2 weeks ago, we moved you into your own bedroom. You ar

I am a fourth year medical student. It’s kind of nice because for the first time, patients and residents trust my judgment. Perhaps it is because I exude more confidence or perhaps it’s because the interns are not so far ahead of me.   Or (I suspect this is the main reason) I just don’t care. I don’t care what others think of me. I don’t worry about not passing and thankfully there are no exams at the end of my rotations for me to pass. I started fourth year with a rotation on Safe and Healthy Families. The doctors there diagnose and facilitate treatment for child abuse. It was very interesting and one of the pediatric subspecialties I could really see myself doing but I did have some trouble stomaching the extreme nature of certain cases. If I were a CAP (Child Abuse Pediatrician) I would worry about missing things and I am not sure I could live with the guilt of not catching something major. This last month. I worked as a Sub-I on general pediatrics. It was hard. I worked f

Dear Caila You are now 6 months old and huge. You weight 19lbs and 6oz so you are about 92 percentile for weight but your height is still average. Your head circumference is in the 70 th percentile. I am just astonished by how big you’ve gotten. I still remember when we could lay you horizontally in your crib! Now I have to stand on tiptoes just to put you in the crib without your feet hitting the bars. You can now roll back to belly and you do this weird shimmy thing with your legs that allow you to spin around. Though I have enjoyed breastfeeding you (somewhat), you are now too distracted to eat properly and I find that my supply is just not what it use to be. This may be because I took 2 weekend trips away from you (one in May to go to Aunt Varsha’s bachelorette party and another in June to attend her wedding). Anyways, we have transitioned you to the bottle. I still pump for you and breastfeed you at night but you get about 50% formula now. I sometimes miss breastfeeding

I noticed that both my husband and I are on our phones A LOT and it is beginning to worry me. In an age of rapid change, I want my daughter to be technologically savvy but I also want her to develop personal connections with the people around her. I worry that as she grows up, TV, Ipads, and Iphones will take center stage in her life and comparisons to others on social media will damage her self-esteem. In an attempt to prevent such outcomes, I have resolved to do the following: 1. Starting from when she can eat solids, we will eat at the dinning room table as a family without our phones or other electronic devices. Growing up, we always had dinner together as a family and I really enjoyed the attention each evening. It allowed me to share my stories and helped me feel connected to my parents. Though I never told them everything, I think being forced to have dinner with them every night helped me open up to them more then if I had ate alone. 2. We will limit her TV/phone/ipad