3 year checkup

J had his 3 year checkup at the doctor yesterday. As we all know, he's a big kid. Currently, he's in the 97th percentile for both height and weight. But it doesn't take a doctor to tell me that he's big-- I just handed down some of his outgrown clothes to a child that's a year older than him. It felt good to do so, though. This kid's mom gave us some serious hand me downs when J was a baby. It's nice to be able to give back. :)

The rest of his exam went pretty well. He's big, healthy, has textbook perfect ears, etc. But, as always, we had to rehash the drooling thing. Up until now the doctor has always just written it off to "he's probably teething", and "it's probably due to his allergies." Well, after spending a bit of time in the room with him, I guess she realized just how drooly he is. That, along with some other muscle tone and motor skill tests (like hopping/jumping) that he didn't do so good at concerned her enough to give us a referral to a speech pathologist with the diagnosis of "hypotonia". Hypotonia... basically, all it means is low muscle tone. Who knew that a kid who can talk your ear off could have lax muscles in his mouth/jaw?

I did some research about hypotonia last night, and it scared the bejeezus out of me. Go ahead and look for yourself. Of course, I'm not scared enough to think that J has some horribly devastating form of muscular dystrophy or cerebral palsy, but until I hear it out of the doctor's mouth that this is the absolute extent of his problem, I don't think I'll rest well. Kids are cruel, and while drooling is not really a huge medical problem, imagine the picking-on that will go on if he hasn't learned to control it by the time he starts school.

And so now to make our appointments and wait for someone to tell us that it's really no big deal. In the meantime, all I want to do is disappear into a ball of yarn for a little while... focus on something else.