It's not easy being green....

Graphs happen when your mom is a nerd. 

In addition to celebrating birthdays, we also took Allison to the doctor last week for her annual checkup.  She's grown 3/4 of an inch since June and gained a pound.  It's actually quite the growth spurt for her.  Usually, those are the numbers we see in a year.

However, she's not growing enough (as was evidenced by the vast height discrepancy between her and every other kid at her birthday party.  Why are we concerned?  Well, the average kid would be the blue line, a 50th percentile.  Perhaps you are simply destined to be small.... you would be on the red line.   You're making similar progress but not keeping up.  However, you're not falling behind.  rather than 5 foot 6, you end up as 5 foot 2.

Then there is the green curve.  This is the curve of "not only are your not keeping up - the lag increases the farther we go."  This is the curve of "perhaps you'll end up being 4 foot 6, if that."  

Since Allison started out small (always under 25%, and hanging out near 3-5% for a long time), we weren't sure if we were on the red curve or the green curve.  Sometimes you have a "constitutional growth delay," which is that your body thinks it's 4 years old when really it's 7 year old.  This is not too bad because that means that rather than stopping growth at aged 15 or 16; you might still be growing a little at aged 20.  This gives you a little more time to catch up.

Given that she's been lagging since kindergarten now, there's a pretty good change we're on the green curve.  Not only have we fallen off the chart (there aren't percentage lines that apply anymore), we're barely trending upwards.  (while 3/4 of an inch was great - it should have been about 2-3 inches at her age.)

So, time to investigate, and investigating sounds like not a lot of fun - blood tests (thyroid, hormone), bone scans (density and age), and trips to see the specialists in Madison.  Potentially more decisions about controversial medications.

But sitting in the doctor's office, I thought about how much we measure against things like we do with growth curves.  There's math and reading proficiencies, social skills benchmarks, fine and gross motor skills.  We're always measuring against something.  With Allison and her all-elusive "non-specific developmental delays," we pay more attention to these measurements.  We always hope for the red curve; and sometimes find ourselves on the green.  This is followed by more decisions about when and how to intervene - more therapy, different therapy, will she re-qualify for assistance in school?  And you make all these decisions with no idea what the rest of the curve looks like.  For the scientific mind, there's no control group - no "hey look, this is where we'd be if we hadn't XYZ."  Really there is only one curve, a pink one that's just Allison, and it's full of swirls and loops.

So, we'll investigate this growth delay and see where it take us.  Nowhere but up.... literally.