Doctor Doctor

Selecting a pediatrician for your unborn child can be one of the hardest decisions to make.  Harder than breast or bottle, circumcision or not, and on.  This is harder when it's your first child, because if you are lucky your subsequent children will have the same doctor.

When I was expecting Turkey I asked my mom for advice on this.  I had been looking through a list of pediatricians my insurance accepted and I saw a name I recognized, Dr. P.  I called my mom and she confirmed that Dr. P had been my youngest brother's doctor and my mom had loved her back then.  I did the math and calculated she had been practicing for at least 20 years (a bonus in my eyes).  She was part of a larger practice with great hours and policies and she was accepting new patients. Score.

Dr. P has always been the right doctor for us, she works for our family.  She works because she has similar child rearing philosophies.  I think it's critical to see eye to eye with your doctor.  If you are a breastfeeding mama, seeing a pediatrician that does fully support breastfeeding is not going to help you. If you are the type of person that likes medicine and medicine now for their child, then seeing a doctor who takes a wait and see philosophy is not going to work.  I think I am very fortunate to have found a doctor that sees eye to eye with us on key issues.  And to this date, she has never steered us wrong, even her referrals to other doctor's for Turkey have been spot on with our thinking.  Like mindedness I like to call it.

Monkey's 4 month well-baby-visit this week just reinforced this.  Dr. P was thrilled to see he was exclusively breastfeed, and agrees with our philosophy of not introducing solids till after 6 months.  Then I asked her about vitamin D for Monkey.  I've seen conflicting reports on whether or not breastfeed babies need vitamin D and I wanted her opinion, as I really against giving it to him but wanted to make sure I wasn't misinformed.  She told us that we are all a little vitamin D deficient and the push to give breastfeed babies vitamin D was relatively new, and as such no long term studies have been done to see if any damage is done.  Then she sealed the deal by saying "Breast milk is a complete meal for baby and has been for thousands of years.  Why go messing with nature?"  I wanted to hug her, I really did.

Anyhow, Monkey is doing wonderfully.  He was 14 lbs. and 7 oz, (50%) and 26.5-inches long (90+%).  I wonder if he'll be taller than Turkey (and Turkey is tall for his age).  At 4 months Turkey was 14 lbs. and 3 oz. and 25-inches long (he was smaller than Monkey at birth as well).  I guess only time will tell.