I had a delightful day at Mount Usher Gardens today. We managed to eat while the rain was pouring, the food was wonderful, the garden was beautiful and all green and freshened and sunlit. There was a band on and the kids painted pottery with a lovely company from Blackrock, Rainbow Ceramics.
I went with the kids and my sister in law and my nephew. He'd just woken up and wasn't particularly eager to sit through lunch. He's a boy who needs to be on the go and loud and hammering things and his mother was fairly stressed out. I find the best way to deal with him is endless distraction, but you do lose patience, energy and creativity for that after a while, I know.
She'd just taken him for his 3 year (and final) developmental assessment with the health nurse. Bodhi's is due in a couple weeks. Be ready for it now, she said, eyes rolling. They ask all sorts of things, like he has to hop on one leg, and they ask him loads of words from the dictionary.
I smile and think of Bodhi's last assessment last year, where he spontaneously hopped on one leg while waiting for the doctor to ask me stuff and she told me that they wouldn't be looking for that til the following year... and how Olivia pointed out that the 'motor bike' the nurse had pointed to was in fact a motorcycle and the 'monkey' was a chimpanzee...
So I managed not to mention those things. Actually, I'm sure the cousin is hopping without bother, he's ready for the U12 football team already and could probably climb anything you pointed him at.
AND Olivia's pronunciation is now nowhere near as good as it was when she was three, it's getting bizarrely garbled.
Still. I'm always proud at developmental checks.
5 comments:
I have the same. I know it's silly, but I still think back fondly of Jack's two year checkup. While the nurse was asking if he was speaking yet, he looked up at me, and said "Mama, what is "zolder" in English?" (This looks weird because obviously he said it in Dutch - makes a lot more sense that way. The answer is "attic.")
:)
I did have one weird one with BOdhi, when he was v small. The nurse was asking me all sorts about was he speaking and standing and doing blah blah, and the answer was No to ALL of them. But as it wasn't my first baby I didn't panic and rush to consult a private ... consultant - I just figured she was asking me the wrong set of questions and carried on.
:-) Jack couldn't kick a ball when they said he should. I went home and told Babes to practice with him, then thought fuck it and just left it.
I hate the idea of the "average" child anyway - you are right - for some kids the list of questions is just wrong. If they had chosen slightly different goals, everything may have just seemed fine.
I always feel like I know better than the health person - you know, being the MOTHER and all.
They really did seem like the wrong questions though! I'd no memory of his sister doing any of that so early either :)
And there was no glaring issue at any of his other checks...
is there an 18 months check up? Emm is 21 and hasn't been called for it...
Her last check up didn't go great, apparently she was not crawling the way she was supposed to, and wasn't walking which meant she had delayed development... She got a follow up appointment with their GP a few weeks later and they were happy enough with her then. I don't think she was 'delayed', really! she just crawled the way she wanted to, and she took her time letting go of my hand when walking until she was ready to (nearly 18 months!). She was just concentrating on learning other things, first.
She's walking as well as any other kid now, and she talks a lot...
I just can't bring myself to call the nurse to ask for the appointment, in case there's something else Emm doesn't do right and I spend weeks and weeks worrying again...
Jo, did they have an actual dictionary to ask the kids words from? I don't think Emm will know all the words from a dictionary by three, she has all the German to learn, too!
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