My 8-year-old is tall and beautiful, but her self-worth is shrinking
Like many big babies, our daughter entered the world through a door, and not a tunnel. An emergency C-section culminated in a kind of obstetrical puppet show as the doc held a long, pink, squalling infant above the green surgical sheet separating us from the gore and hollered, ?Heeeeeere?s your baby!? Naturally, my then-partner and I burst into tears.
At 9 pounds, 10 ounces and 22 inches long, our baby was formidable. She wasn?t the biggest baby born in the hospital that night?that prize went to a whopping 14-pound infant born hours earlier?but she was still in the 99th percentile for height and weight. We gave her an old Norse name meaning ?Leader of men.? With her light-blond hair and Arctic-blue eyes, not to mention her stature, she seemed every bit the Viking baby.
From the beginning, our daughter seemed to be older than she really was. ?She looks three months old!? exclaimed my mother as she held E for the first time, a day after she was born. My daughter wasn?t just bigger than most babies?she also had sweet chubby cheeks, plenty of hair, and a perfectly round head that hadn?t been squeezed through a birth canal. Subsequent visitors made similar comments.Â
Even so, newborn E seemed pretty tiny to me. She was my first baby, so I had nothing to compare her to. Her stature didn?t really hit me until I attended a mom?s group meetup a few weeks later. We set our newborns on someone?s living room floor as we drank tea and rambled semi-coherently about sleep deprivation. ...
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